The Watts Hays Letters

"Albakerk Rio del nort the 18th July 1849 I stoped my wagons In 15 miles of Santafee . . . We have all enjoyed good health . . & have flatring hopes of health & high pay for my Treble. . . I swapted 2 of my cows for a mule & one for an ox." -John S. Watts

"Cold Springs, June 20 California Certainly is the best Country in the world, it lacks nothing but good society. The vallys are the most beautifull Scenery in the world. You Can Stand on the Mountains and See the Ships under Sail in great numbers and the greatest variety of Beautiful flowers that Ever you Saw in your life covers the hole of the land."
-John S. Watts, Jr.

"December the 4, 1861 I wrote to you last month one day after my husband had a battle on little Blue some eight miles from hear. . . Their was 95 came to our house . . gave me thirty minutes to take out what I wanted in the house. . . They went to the upper rooms. Set fire to ever corner . . They left me with the little Children a setting by the few things left me."
-Margaret Watts Hays

How these letters were saved:
In 1928 an article in the Kansas City (Missouri) Star announced the publication in the Missouri Historical Review a few of the Civil War letters of Margaret Jane Watts Hays Overstreet She was the widow of Col. Upton Hays, a Confederate officer from Jackson Co., MO who was killed in 1862. The letters were found in Margaret's trunk of keepsakes after her death in 1923 and kept together by her oldest daughter, Mary Elizabeth "Betty" Hays Moutrey.

The trunk contained much more than a few Civil War letters, in fact the letters begin in 1849 and continue on to the early 1900's. The letter writers were members of the large and interconnected Watts, Hays, Berry, Boone, Yager and Yocum families who settled Kentucky in the late 1700's and early 1800's and then moved on to Missouri.

Margaret is the central figure in this history of a family. The 1849 letter is by her father, John S. Watts, who wrote from Albuquerque, New Mexico to tell his family how he was faring on his journey to the California gold fields. Her brother wrote her from the diggings at Cold Springs, California in about 1850 and there was the packet of letters Margaret had written to her mother in California from 1852 to 1872. There is a letter from her young nephew, Tommy Yocum, who died at the Battle of Corinth in 1861 and a treasured letter from Rev. Cornelius Yager, a cousin who preached the funeral oration for her father in 1860.

Betty Hays Moutrey saw the letters as a chronicle of the times which her mother had lived. She wanted them to be published but was unable to do that herself. She was born in Jackson County, Missouri, and was only five years old when the Civil War started and had little opportunity for schooling in war-torn Missouri. She saw the publication of a few letters but did not, for some reason, provide more letters for publication. The Missouri Historical Review articles were written by Betty's cousin Virginia Hays Asbury and Virginia's son-in-law, Albert S. Doerschuk.

Betty married young, raised a family and passed the letters on to her daughters. Eventually the letters and other documents were passed on to the next generation who took over the legacy, so finally the complete collection of letters and other documents will appear here.