Grover Cleveland Johnston was born 13 January 1889 near Madison, in what is now Lake County, SD, the fourth child and second son of George Perry Johnston and Elizabeth Mittelstedt. He was named for the president of the United States at that time. He came home to his parents and two older sisters, Leota (Ota) and Sarah (Sadie). A brother, Oscar, died of diphtheria in 1896, two years before Grover was born.

South Dakota land records show that the Perry Johnstons had 80 acres of land, purchased by patent from the US Government in 1883, lying between the Big Sioux and Vermilion valleys in Dakota Territory.

By the time the Johnstons arrived, Madison was a railroad town with a flourmill, a newspaper and a schoolhouse. We know little about Grover's life there. It is known that from the year of his birth until 1897, the area was in severe drought. It is not known exactly what precipitated the decision to move; however, by 1895, when Grover was 6 years old, his family had packed up and began a move to Rapid City, located at the far western side of Dakota Territory. It is probable that other relatives had gone before them and even that others traveled with them across the territory to where Indian lands were once again being opened to settlers.

Grover and his sisters often recalled the trip across Dakota Territory as a great adventure. Grover and his sister Sadie were running along behind the wagon hanging onto crates of chickens when the wagon went down into a creek bed and up the other side. The crates almost crushed them when the wagon dipped as it crossed the stream.

Grover's mother was expecting her sixth child, and on the 27th of June 1895, Grover's brother Fred was born in the wagon near the little town of Hatch City, about half way across Dakota Territory. The family stayed here for a short while close to an Army fort where supplies were available. Grover's father delivered the mail at Woonsocket and Grover remembered his dad "riding the mail" and of the storms and other hazards.

By the fall of 1896, we know that Grover and his family were in Pennington County and Rapid City as records show that he and his older sisters were enrolled in Upper Rapid School there for the 1896-97 school year.

Grover's family rented land "on the old Lon Leedy place" in Pennington County and put in crops of corn and wheat. Grover had another brother, Elmer John, born 15 March 1898. The family was beginning to prosper again and had many relatives and friends in the area.

Then, in August 1899, occurred the event that would have an effect on Grover and his siblings for the rest of their lives. On the evening of August 14th, Grover's father became ill and after suffering terrible pain throughout the night, died the morning of the 15th. He was 52, Grover's mother was 37 and she had 6 children at home, ages 17 to one year. Grover was 10 years old.

Grover's sister, Ota, was engaged to Ben Bowmer and his family came and harvested their crops that fall. Grover, Sadie and Anna went to school. Grover's mother worked outside the home, cleaning and cooking, and eventually worked full time as a cook at the "Garlick House Inn" owned by the Jollys, relatives of the Bowmers. Not much is known of Grover's life in the next ten years. We know by his own words that he felt the heavy responsibility of being the oldest son, that he regretted having his education cut short, that he deeply resented his mother's having to clean and cook and work so hard for others and that he developed a strong rebellious streak. He remembered spending some time in a Catholic home for boys; he remembered herding sheep when he was 11 for a man that did not leave him any supplies and who wanted to charge him for a sheep he slaughtered for food. He always worked, from odd jobs around Rapid City to cowboy and farm hand and carpenter's helper. He remembers seeing Calamity Jane ride into Lead, SD with her gang, and described her as "filthy dirty and ugly as sin". He found very little romance in the life of a cowboy; mostly long hard days, lousy food and little pay.

We do know that in 1906, Grover and his sisters Anna and Sadie, and a young man named Ivan Goodner, joined the Congregational Church. Grover was 17 years old.

In 1909, two more events occurred that changed the direction of his life. First, his beloved sister Sadie, married Ivan Goodner, and left Rapid City for good. Secondly, the US Government had just opened more Indian lands to settlers, this time in eastern Montana, a short journey to the west. And Grover's sister Leota, and her husband Ben and family, had already gone there and homesteaded 80 acres

Anna was in her last year of high school and planning to teach as soon as she graduated.

Grover's mother applied for a homestead and once again the family packed up their wagons and headed west. On this trip, Grover took his father's place as the oldest son (he was 20 years old) for a party that consisted of his mother and two younger brothers, Fred who was 14 and Elmer who was 11. They were accompanied by a Bowmer family, Jim and his wife Ella and their daughter.

Elmer described the trip as follows in an interview with his grand niece Emmalyn King:

"The wagon was covered with a tarp. It rained torrents and the clay gumbo stuck to the wagon wheels and the wheels got bigger and bigger. The only place they could find to get under shelter was an abandoned building that had a pot bellied stove. It was an old saloon. Ella Thatcher who had married a Bowmer didn't do anything but bawl all the way..."

After a long muddy, rainy trip, the party arrived in eastern Montana, in what was originally all Custer County, near the small communities of Webster and Willard and the bigger communities of Ekalaka and Baker. They arrived in the fall and Grover's mother and the younger boys, or at least Elmer, probably stayed with Ota and Ben. Grover may have looked for and found work on the Hash Knife Ranch, a large and well-known ranching operation in the area.

The picture below was described as the first shelter built by Grover and his family on Lizzie's homestead. The tarpaper exterior is being banked with sod, a common method on prairie frontiers to provide security from the fierce winters and hot summers until a frame or stone house could be built. (No one seems to know where Fred was at this time-perhaps he was the cameraman).

By 1913, Grover, Fred and Elmer had built a house on Lizzie's homestead and crops had been planted. The homesteaders ploughed and planted wheat and other crops and waited for the rain. It was called "dry land farming" and it was aptly named. Too often the land stayed dry. In 1913, the wind "blew the crop right out of the ground" and many farmers gave up and left or turned to other occupations to survive.

Did Grover and his mother and brothers continue to try to grow crops during the season and work elsewhere in the winters? Unfortunately, the story of how the family kept the homestead and lived during the period from 1913 or 1914 until 1929 has largely been forgotten. Grover did talk about those days if asked; he had a lot of warm memories of family and good friends that went through the struggle with him, but no one in his family had the foresight to write it down or capture it on tape so much remains unknown to this generation. Anna taught school until she married Bert Tope and settled down in Iowa, Sadie never returned to SD or MT, Ota and Ben and their children went on west to the forests of Idaho and Washington. Elmer opened and ran a livery stable in Ekalaka at a very young age and Lizzie went to keep house for him for a time. Fred worked in Miles City in a restaurant at least one winter but he also worked with Grover raising horses on the homestead.

In 1917, Fred and his mother apparently made a trip to visit his sisters and their families, probably going by train to Iowa first to Anna and Bert Tope's farm. While visiting "in the east", Fred was ill for some time; recovering to travel on to Idaho and Washington where he and Grover's mother visited Ota and Ben and perhaps Sadie. Shortly after his return, Fred enlisted in the Army to serve in WWI, and went to what was then "Camp Lewis" in Washington for basic training. He was rejected because of a "bad heart", fell victim to the Spanish influenza epidemic raging through the military training centers and was very ill when he arrived home by train and Grover picked him up at the station. In Grover's own words, Fred "died in the bed beside him at the hotel in Baker". Grover was unable to find a doctor to come in the night to the hotel, but it is not likely that one could have saved Fred. This was a terrible flu strain that killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world before it died out.

With Fred gone, Grover and Elmer now had the responsibility of managing the homestead and trying to eke out a living on the land. We simply do not know how they did that from 1918 after Fred's death until 1929 when we have evidence of the birth of the Johnston Brothers Coal Company.

By 1929, Grover had realized that the one "crop" that might give them a steady income was the layer of lignite coal that lay just beneath the soil on the homestead.

The account book for the coal mine operation begins in 1929.

Names listed as working for the Johnston Brothers Coal Company are familiar ones to the settlers of Carter and Fallon Counties. Many farmers traded food items for coal during the depression years. Cash flow was always a problem because the state and federal government did not accept a heifer or hundred pounds of corn in lieu of royalty checks.

Despite the problems, the business did well for several years, enough so that Grover followed in his father's footsteps, taking an interest in education and the establishment of schools in the area. In 1933, Grover was a member of a local school board and tasked with going to Billings to select a teacher for the Spring Creek School, Willard, MT.

Jobs were really in demand in the middle of the Great Depression and as Grover told the story, he walked into a room with a dozen or more applicants lined up to be interviewed for the lone teaching position. He was appalled at having to pick one from so many who needed a job but he said "as soon as I saw her, I knew that was the one. I said "I'll take the little one with the red shoes". And the rest is history.

VESTA LOUISE LANE

Vesta Louise Lane was born 24 March 1908, near Marysville, KS, the only child of Florence Finola Meyer and Edward Henry Lane.

Vesta was a twin, she and her sister Vera being born sometime in the sixth or seventh month, courtesy of, according to her mothers, a very rough ride to town in a horse and wagon that day. The twins were so small that Florence wrapped them in cotton and put them in a grape basket; a doctor came but he advised Florence that neither would survive. When she was three days old, Vera did die, but little Vesta slowly grew stronger. Florence would entertain her grandchildren many years later with tales of how she fed the tiny baby with an eye dropper.

Ed Lane worked for the railroad, as did his father, and was gone for long periods of time. Eventually, the responsibility seemed too much to the young father, and he did not return at all.

Florence's father was Swiss and had contact with a fellow Swiss who was a bachelor rancher in northern Montana and who needed a housekeeper. He apparently wrote and offered her employment and transportation to the ranch; she packed up her then two year old daughter and made her home for the next 10 or so years on his ranch on the Marias River.

Vesta went to school at the "ranch next door" where Martin Washa and his neighbors hired a "bluestocking" teacher from New England to teach their children both the three "R's" and the nicer civilized touches like good manners, music and art. Vesta said these were the happiest days of her childhood. Vesta had a lovely soprano voice and there were plans to send her "back east" for further voice lessons. However, when Vesta was 10, her mother became romantically involved with a ranch hand and decided to leave her job as housekeeper. Vesta's mother had acquired a share of cattle and some capitol and she now invested it in a home and land near Billings. The romance ended; she now farmed on the "Billings Bench". Vesta rode her horse to a country school, often stopping in on the way home to visit with her grandmother Meyer and her Aunt Lillian who lived nearby.

Vesta attended high school in Billings, graduating in 1927, and following graduation, she enrolled at Eastern Montana Normal School. Her first school was near Lewistown where she boarded with the Herman Krugers. Mrs. Kruger became a lifelong friend.

Eventually she applied for and was selected by Grover Johnston for a teaching position at Spring Creek School near Willard, MT. She was 25; he was 45.

GROVER AND VESTA

Grover Cleveland Johnston and Vesta Louise Lane were married 26 May 1934 at the pastor's home in Medicine Rocks, MT.

Grover and Elmer were running Johnston Bros., Dealers in Lignite Coal, and their mother Lizzie, lived with them on the homestead. Grover had built a two-story house; most of the furnishings were his mother's.

Two children were born to Grover and Vesta while they lived on the homestead, Florence Louise on 9 February 1936 and Bonita Jean, on 3 February 1937.

Grover had long realized that dry land farming was not suited to the land they had homesteaded. He had an "engineer's mind" and he had tried to organize support for an irrigation system to be built that would ensure a water supply to the crops without relying on rains that more often than not did not come. In the summer of 1938, Grover and his family stayed with Vesta's mother on her farm on the Billings Bench while Grover learned about irrigation projects. Back in Baker, he tried to gain support for such a project while engineering the Little Beaver Creek to irrigate his own place. But the resources just were not there in a land still suffering the effects of the drought years and the Great Depression.

1939 heralded the beginning of the end of the Great Depression but it was too late for the Johnston Brothers Coal Company. Unable to generate enough cash to support his family and pay the state and federal royalties, Grover had to let the homestead revert to the government for nonpayment of the royalties.

Then as the family was trying to assess their losses and prepare to move on, Grover's mother suffered a stroke and died 20 March 1939. She was buried in Bonnivale Cemetery in Baker, MT beside her son Fred.

Vesta found a job teaching in 1939/40 in Plentywood, MT. In the summers the family lived with Vesta's mother at her farm on the Billings Bench and helped with the dairy cattle and truck farming. They grew beautiful strawberries. Vesta and Grover rented the farm from Vesta's mother and contemplated buying it. Elmer worked with them.

Grover contracted influenza that fall and did not recover quickly. Vesta found a teaching position near Lewistown, MT at Lucier School in 1941/42. Florence and Bonnie went to school each day with Vesta and so began their school days a little earlier than most. Grover began searching for work as soon as he was able and found a job with a local sand and gravel company in Lewistown. He applied for a social security card.

In 1942, Grover and Vesta had moved to the farm on the Billings Bench, Grover had applied for and been hired to work for the Ohio Oil Company, and the couple had their first son, George Edward, born 4 July 1942, in Billings, MT. Baby George, a preemie, stayed in Billings with his grandma Morgan while his parents settled into a home in Dry Creek, MT where Vesta was teaching school.

During this time, Grover and Vesta purchased the farm on the Billings Bench from Vesta's mother.

Vesta taught school at Dry Creek, MT for 2 years. During her first year in 1942/43, her mother came to care for the baby and help with the two older girls.

Grover was working at Elk Basin, WY and waiting for housing to be available in the oil "camp". That summer, Grover, Vesta, and the three children rented near Powell, WY and moved into Elk Basin in 1944. In March 1945, Vesta and Grover had a fourth child and second son, Robert John, born in Billings, MT.

Grover was offered a transfer to an oil field called Kyle near the little town of Medicine Bow, WY. The family moved there in the late fall of 1945. Kyle was a small community built and maintained by the Ohio Oil Company to service their gas wells in that area. It was constructed on a plateau 7,333 feet above sea level. The wind blew constantly and in winter often reached speeds of 90 to 100 miles an hour.

The oil company furnished a schoolhouse and the state of Wyoming furnished a teacher for the children of the employees. Homes were small but modern and well constructed. Grover was busy with his work, the children had huge areas to explore, but the women had very little to do outside the daily realm of housekeeping. Vesta had books mailed in from the Laramie library for herself and the children, enrolled the girls in 4H at distant Elk Mountain, bought a piano for lessons and her own enjoyment, played records on the old wind up Victrola and sang a lot. The radio was their contact with the world and unless the road was snowed in, the trusty rural mail carrier brought the mail once a week.

Grover and Vesta bought a lot in the town of Medicine Bow in 1948 and began to construct a home there in anticipation of their two oldest children's graduation from 8th grade and entering high school. The winter of 1948/49 was the last that the family lived at Kyle and the worst winter Wyoming had in recorded history. The people at Kyle were marooned for over a month with no one being able to get in or out.

Grover continued to commute from Medicine Bow to Kyle once his family moved there until 1952 when he retired.

Vesta went back to teaching, first at Walcott, WY and then after the two oldest children graduated high school, she taught at Douglas, WY and then at the Boxelder School, back in ranch country near Glenrock, WY. Sons George and Bob went to school to their mother and found Boxelder a great adventure. George remembers that his dad " taught me to trap badgers, as they would get into the chicken coop and kill our laying hens."

It was quite a trip to Glenrock on mountain roads and George says "Dad seldom took a drink of hard liquor but once he did stop on the way home from Glenrock and we had a very fast ride home to Boxelder. He was always very generous, always asking a fellow teacher further up the road if she needed a ride to town whenever we went (even though Bob and I didn't particularly care for her). The time in Boxelder was sort of a step back in time for Dad as we had neither electricity nor running water and it didn't seem to faze him at all. He helped saw and chop the quaking aspen that we used to heat the house. He purchased a gas lantern with mantels so that we could stay up late and study".

In 1956, Vesta accepted a school in Ft. Bridger, WY. Grover accompanied her, helping with the house and spending time with his growing sons. Summers were spent at their home in Medicine Bow.

George says, "He was our assistant Boy Scout leader and took Bob and I and two other scouts to the New Forks Lakes, near Pinedale, WY for summer camp. He made our theme "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" and of course, we had to explain where that came from."

Grover had suffered a series of small strokes from about 1960 on but had always recovered. George remembers that when he was still in high school at Ft. Bridger that "Dad was revived by getting oxygen from a garage in town. His best friend was George Calvert who had lost his wife to cancer and they spent many hours talking. Dad was becoming forgetful and once drove the car in second gear for over 40 miles."

In the summers Grover and Vesta always returned to their home in Medicine Bow, where Grover planted a garden and drove a water truck for the road crews as long as he was able. "On the three lots, he had a big garden and was able to grow a Siberian crabapple, gooseberries, raspberries, wild plum and ash. He always had a "hot bed" to start tomatoes because of the very short growing season. This was his favorite activity after he retired," remembers his son George.

Little William Grover Johnston, a grandson, lived with them in Ft. Bridger and Medicine Bow for a few years, and was a great source of joy to both of them.

In 1965, Vesta retired from teaching and the family moved back permanently to Medicine Bow. Both sons had graduated high school and gone on and the family now consisted of Grover and Vesta and grandson Billy.

Grover had several strokes and suffered from emphysema during his last years. He wrote faithfully to his sister Ota until her death, and was visited by sister Anna as she traveled between California and Iowa each summer. His brother Elmer came and stayed with him for awhile when he was very ill in 1968. That year, Vesta asked the whole family to gather at Thanksgiving and he was surrounded with his children and grandchildren.

In 1969, he was hospitalized in Laramie, WY and passed away on 29 Aug 1969.

Grover became a Jehovah's Witness sometime in the late 1920's or 30's and remained a believer the rest of his life. He taught his children the Bible and did his best to inspire them to lead a life of unselfish love and giving. He truly believed that we are our brother's keeper and he tried his best to live up to that tenet of Christianity. His love of his wife and children permeated his world and his children never felt deprived even in the hardest times. Family ties were ever remembered and he never lost touch with his sisters or brother nor let his children forget his heritage.

George says, "Dad was always fearlessly protective of us. Once I was accused of breaking up some hay bales and he drove all the way back from Medicine Bow (to Ft Bridger) to confront the deputy sheriff and ensure that I was not involved nor should I be accused."

Grover Cleveland Johnston was buried in Greenhill Cemetery in Laramie, WY on 3 September 1969.

Vesta taught school for several years after Grover's death eventually returning to Billings where she lived with her youngest son, Bob for a year, then in Casa Village mobile home park. She worked for RSVP, Foster Grandparents and as a volunteer school aide until she moved to Prairie Towers, a senior apartment complex. She had many friends there and spent all but the last year of her life among them. In 1987, she became ill, and moved to a daughter's home in Kansas, where she passed away on 8 January 1988. She was buried beside Grover in Greenhill Cemetery in Laramie, WY.