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The ancestry of Martha ("Mattie") Jane Pruit has been traced to David Pruit who was born 1783 in Virginia, probably Henry County. By 1804, when David was twenty-one years of age, he was living in Knox County, Kentucky, where on March 21, 1804, he married Peggy Kizziah. Records show that some five years later, May 12, 1809, he married second Charlotta ("Lottie") Daugherty in Lincoln County, Kentucky. She had been born in 1793 in Tennessee.
David and Peggy Pruit had only one child, a son born about 1807 in Kentucky. David and Charlotte ("Charlotta") S. Pruit, however, had eleven children, seven sons and four daughters, one of whom was John Thomas, born about 1810 in Kentucky or Tennessee. By 1812 David and Charlotte were living in Anderson County, Tennessee, but by 1833 the family had migrated to the Missouri Territory, later a part of Van Buren County, Arkansas. David at age seventy-seven Charlotte age sixty-seven, the 1860 Census of Henderson county, Texas, listed them living with their son Doctor F. Pruit in the Fincastle Community.
John "Thomas" Pruit, Mattie's grandfather and son of David and Charlotte, was born in 1812 in Tennessee, probably Anderson County. He came to Arkansas undoubtedly with his father in 1833 or early in 1834. There about 1835 he married Rachel Adeline Wylie, daughter of Samuel and Nancy Wylie. John and Rachel farmed in Benton, Conway County, Arkansas, until 1854 when they moved to Texas settling there in Henderson County in 1855 where they remained for over forty years, both dying 1897 at their homestead. Samuel Thomas Pruit, "Mattie's" father and son of John Thomas and Rachel, was born in 1842 in Conway County, Arkansas. He came to Texas with his father and mother and other siblings and lived with them in Henderson county until after the Civil War.
Both Samuel Thomas (Tom) and his brother James L. joined the Confederate Army and fought for the Southern cause. Tom Pruit enlisted January 27, 1862 I Company F, 32nd Texas Cavalry at Camp Crump, Texas. He was appointed 5th Sergeant February 28, 1863 and served in that rank until discharged. When the two brothers returned to Henderson county conditions were so bleak that they decided to resettle. Tom then began a search for a better location. One of the first things he found, however, was a bride. She lived in Tarrant County, Texas, and was named Mary Ellen Curry. As to when they first met or how long the courtship lasted is not known, but on September 9, 1868, they were married in Tarrant county. Tom brought his bride back to Henderson County to live until their new homestead could be established in Montague County, Texas. It is highly probably that in 1874 Tom and Mary arrived in Montague County.
Tom Pruit did not care for farming; instead he was a shrewd trader. He never used a bank; his wife was her husband's banker, keeping the money he brought home in the bottom of an old trunk. The dozen of more deeds for land he bought and sold in Montague County during the twelve years he lived there testify to his trading ability.
About 1886 or 1887 Tom and his family including daughter "Mattie", now a three-year old child, left Montague County and stopped in Mitchell County, Texas. Tom again dabbled in farming, then decided to go into the grocery business, built a store in or near Sterling City, stocked it with groceries, and sold it before he ever opened for business. A short time thereafter, he moved his family to Dickens County in the Cap Rock country of West Texas, where he located for about five years, from 1892 or 1893 to 1898. While in that county, Tom engaged in building a heard of blooded Steeldust horses that he intended to breed and sell. Good saddle horses were brining premium prices and seemed destined to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
By 1898-1899 Tom or some of his sons scouted for the exact place they dreamed of homesteading. Then once again the family was westward bound. They headed for the plains in the Territory of New Mexico. In 1898, sons Charles (Charlie) and Buck trailed a herd of 100 Steeldust brook mares across the Staked Plains to a canyon near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The following spring they brought the herd back to a new home base some fifteen miles west of present day Hobbs, Lea County, New Mexico.
The 1900 Census reveals that Tom, Mary, and their family slowly made their way westward from Montague county to their new home site in Lea County, New Mexico. That year Tom, Mary, Charles, Marion, Martha Jane, and Lily O. were all living near Graham, Young county, Texas. The next year "Mattie" gave as her residence on her marriage license Espuela in present day Crosby County, Texas on the Cap Rock just on the rim of the Llano Estacado. Charlie, Buck, and father Tom filed homesteads near each other in New Mexico, and the three men worked and ranched together until April 1906 when Tom suffered a severe head injury in a wagon accident. Tom never recovered from his injury and died on April 26, 1906 near Monument, Lea County, New Mexico. Wife Mary Ellen joined him there some thirty years later.
Meanwhile on March 6, 1901, "Mattie", now some eighteen years of age, married Smith ("Dock") Ellis. Ellis, a veteran cowman, took his young bride to live at a ranch camp at Girard, Texas. To this couple one child was born, May 13, 1903, in Dickens, Dickens County, Texas, a daughter they named Lena Agnes. In 1905, Dock and Mattie moved to the city of Dickens where Mattie could seek medical treatments. Unfortunately, In March 1906, she died there from a ruptured appendix. Dock soon took his young daughter to Monument, New Mexico, to live with her Pruit grandparents.
Erickson-Ellis Family of West Texas, A Memoir Submitted by Joe E. and Carolyn Ericson
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