Rebecca Hook and her Family

Rebecca Hook and her Family

The Hook family moved to the Campo area in 1868, and the family has been an important part of the community ever since, up until her great grandson, Lester Hook, died a bachelor at 90 years old a few years ago.

Rebecca Hook, thrice-married wife of James Hook, was born in Pickens County, Alabama. At about 15 years old, her family moved to Newton County, Mississippi, where she met and married George A. Fowler in 1850. In short order, they had three children, George, Thomas, and John. At some point they decided to move west and they joined a wagon train bound for Texas. During their time in Texas, George contracted tuberculosis and died in 1857.

Rebecca determined to go on to California, and joined a wagon train that was going west. I suspect that, being a lone woman with three children, she had difficulties in being accepted in the wagon train, because very shortly she married a miner named Thomas R. Garner, who was also in the wagon train. They went as far as La Paz, Arizona, where Garner found gold, and they lived there for a few years.  They had four children in Arizona: Ansel Watson, born in 1858; Jesse Evans, born in 1861; Anna Leah, born in 1862 in Yuma; and Mary Anne, born later in 1865 in San Bernardino, California.

Garner heard that gold mining prospects were better near San Bernardino, so they packed up, taking a baking powder can of peach pit sized gold nuggets he had found in Arizona, and alone, they headed to California with their three children. Rebecca was expecting another baby at the time. The three children by her first marriage were not mentioned, and being all boys, may have been out on their own by this time. They rejoined the family later when Rebecca married her third husband.

The family crossed the Colorado River at Ehrenburg and started across the desert in August. Somewhere near Old Woman Mountain, they lost the trail and veered off in a southerly direction. They ran short of water and the horses gave out. Garner took the gold, left a little water for his family, and headed off on foot to get help in San Bernardino. A few days later in a bar, a miner overheard Garner telling about having left his family out in the desert, and that he thought they would all be dead by now. There are conflicting reports that the miner was a James D. Hook, or a Mr. See, whom no one ever mentioned again. We will go with Hook. He said Garner’s family at least deserved a Christian burial, and he left immediately with mules, food and water.

When Hook found them, he was amazed that they were all still alive. Rebecca had dug a hole in the shade under the wagon for them. When the little water they had was used up, she had kept her children alive on her breast milk, as she was still nursing her third baby, in spite of being pregnant with another. She kept up the children’s spirits telling them Bible stories, and she never gave up hope. When Hook found her he told her she could bring only what she could carry, so she chose her Bible and her flat iron, and they made their way safely to San Bernardino.

There, she was told her husband had been killed in a mining accident, so she set about earning her own living as a laundress for miners. However, it wasn’t long before she married her rescuer, James Derling Hook, just before giving birth to Garner’s last child, Mary Anne Garner.

James Hook was born in Maine at about 1824, His father made grinding wheels for gristmills. When James was about 16 years old, there was a family fight when, as a prank, James cut off his sister’s hair, and ran away, never to return home again. During his lifetime, he was a carpenter, blacksmith, woodsman, distiller, and teamster and he knew quite a bit about gristmills.

Rebecca had no doubt that her second husband was dead, but while visiting a friend, who’s husband was also a miner, she noticed a photograph displayed on the piano that showed a group of miners. The picture had been taken recently, and upon closer inspection, she saw that Garner was in it, very much alive and well when the picture was taken.

Perhaps the possibility of being found to be a bigamist had something to do with the fact that it was about this time, in 1868, that James Hook took up a property on La Posta Road near Campo, and moved his wife and all her children there. He was an enterprising fellow, and in addition to raising cattle, and horses, he built a gristmill, run by a stream that has since dried up. Highlights in their life at this time included: Hook’s cattle were the first purebred Durhams in the county, he became one of the trustees in the first school in the area, and their two children, Charles and Belle, were born. For Rebecca this made a total of nine children.

Due to dissatisfaction with the prospects in Campo, in 1877, the Hooks joined neighbors, the Clines, Burris’, Grumbles, Crabtrees and Ritters, along with Rebecca’s other sons, George and John Fowler, and Ansel and Jessie Garner, in a wagon train heading for better grazing in eastern Arizona. They drove a large herd of 3,600 cattle behind the wagons. By the time the caravan reached Indian Wells, now El Centro, many cattle had died by the wayside or escaped into the desert. Men and beasts neede a well-deserved rest. They made camp, fiddles were brought out, and some members of the train danced all night.

When they resumed their drive, Hook lost forty steers that broke away from the herd and were never found. When they reached the Colorado River, the ferryman charged them the almost ruinous price of thirty cents a head for ferrying the herd across.

They reached a place called High Banks, now Buckeye, where they stayed for a while. One of the wives went on to visit some relatives, and when she came back she had smallpox. Everyone caught the dreaded disease except the Rebecca and James Hook. Rebecca made mittens of yarn made from cottonwood seed for the children to wear, so they wouldn’t scratch themselves.

When they moved on, there was a great lack of food and water, and some cowboys went without food for several days at a time. Food was scarce even in little towns where the scouts sought help. They finally made it to the Tonto Basin, where grass and water was plentiful, and the Hooks settled down at Grapevine Springs where Tonto Creek and Salt River meet.

It was here that conflict broke out between James Hook and his stepson, George Fowler. All the stepsons owned an interest in the cattle they had earned from the work done for their stepfather. They kept coming to James for advances in money, and he grew tired of it. He and Rebecca separated. Rebecca and Belle moved out, but Charley stayed on with his father.

On July 19^th, 1861, James Hook, and both his Garner and Fowler stepsons were in the corral. He and George Fowler were arguing over ownership of cattle they were separating. James was well known to have a hot temper, and he reached for a club to hit George. John Fowler yelled to his brother to shoot, and George shot James Hook in the back and killed him. Nine year-old Charley Hook was sitting on the corral fence and saw it all. The murder was not reported to authorities because it would have been deemed to be a family affair.

George and John Fowler and Jesse Garner left for Nevada, but Jesse turned back and returned to Campo. John Fowler also returned later. Thomas Fowler, who was still living in Campo, went to the Tonto Basin and helped Rebecca with James Hook’s estate

Rebecca took Charley and Belle back to Campo, and had trouble with Indians on the way. A friend, Joe Fuquay, whom they met on the trail, helped them, and Joe drove one of the Hook’s wagons back to Campo. Later he married a widow, Lucy Ann Derrick, who became the mother of Isola Derrick, the woman Charley Hook later married.

Rebecca and her two youngest children lived on the La Posta ranch until 1882, when she bought a sheep ranch closer to Campo just at the time of a great blizzard. There were four feet of snow on level ground in Campo, and six feet at the higher elevation of Rebecca’s new ranch. There were drifts 20 to 40 feet high in the Laguna Mountains. The storm killed all the sheep on her ranch just before she was to move in. Charley later told of burning sheep carcasses for days before the snow melted.

Rebecca also bought another 150 acres from Marion Hayden to the east, not adjoining her property. Her son Jesse, homesteaded 160 acres, but he lost half of it for a whiskey bill at Buckman Springs Store and Tavern. Rebecca bought the other 80 acres that was next to her ranch. Her son Ansel ‘Watt’ Garner and Alonzo Warren went back to Texas and brought back the Hook cattle left there.

Rebecca was a busy woman, running the ranch, caring for several grandchildren left at the ranch, and answering every call as midwife. She delivered most of the babies born in the area for years. She helped her neighbors in any way she could at any time they needed her help. She remained on the ranch even after Charles grew up, married and took over the ranch, but spent many months each year living with her daughters, Anna and Maryanne. The lives of Rebecca’s son Charles Hook and his wife Isola are the subject for another story.

Information for this article was taken from an article by Rebecca Hook's great, great grandson, James W Hook of Boise, Idaho, published in the summer issue of Mountain Heritage of 1998, and from the archives of the Mountain Empire Historical Society, located at the Gaskill Brothers' Stone Store Musem in Campo California.