Kate Comes West

Cats, birds, caterpillars. 
I can't even keep the peas I planted in my back yard alive.  

Today I am trackiing the path of Kate (Mary Catherine Evans Allison) and her family's migration.  What would it have been like to pack up your family? Leave your home soil of North Carolina. Cross mountains. Hike your gear a thousand miles to the wilderness that was Mississippi, Arkansas or Texas. 
Clear the land.
Then plant crops. 
Then fight off cats, birds, catepillars and any number of unknown predators while having  a new baby every other year and keeping those kids alive. 

You would have to be some kind of tough. Some kind of resourceful. Some kind of lucky.
But why?  It still doesn't answer the question why go west at all.

This morning I wondered about the why enough to research: emigration N. Carolina 1800.
I found out why...

"By the 1830s, almost as many people were leaving North Carolina as were being born there! "

The reason for this mass exodus according to a web presentation of the UNC school of Education was the"  “present languishing condition” of North Carolina.
 This article says that during the first half of the 1800s North Carolina was the third most populated state in the Union. It was also known as the Rip Van Winkle State. Bad roads, poor education and farming practices that depleted the soil made it harder and harder to survive as a farmer.  

People poured out of N. Carolina and went west. By 1860 this state was 12th in population.   "Thirty percent of North Carolina’s native-born population, amounting to more than four hundred thousand persons, was living outside of the state in 1860."

Our Evans are some of those folks. Kate's papa William M Evans was born in North Carolina in 1813. His clan was in Neshoba Mississippi to meet the census taker in 1840. Lucky for us they could grow peas…. and everything else they needed.


Source: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4389  Searching for greener pastures: Out-migration in the 1800s - North Carolina Digital History