Archives West Finding Aid

About 1964, Katherine Fisher took a number of documents she had inherited from her mother and typed a lengthy combination transcription and genealogy essay. Included in the essay is a transcription of an 1863 letter written during the siege of Vicksburg from her grandmother's first husband, John E. Baker, an ordnance sergeant with the Third Battalion Missouri Cavalry, CSA. Fisher also transcribed a lengthy letter written by her grandmother, Flora Baker Gardner, to D.M. Vinsonhaler describing in meticulous detail the Gardner family's trip to Montana. They left Missouri in the spring of 1879 and traveled by steamboat, the Red Cloud, up the Missouri River to Fort Benton. From that point they took to wagon teams to Sun River, through the Prickly Pear Valley, to the Gallatin Valley and Bozeman where they settled. A very terse diary kept during the same trip by Katherine's grandfather, Edwin Morgan Gardner forms part of the typescript as well. Another transcribed letter in the document is a condolence written from Bozeman, Montana in 1867 by J. M. Baker to his sister-in-law, Flora, on the death of her first husband. Genealogical charts of the Baker, Gardner, and Fisher families and a history of the Bozeman Presbyterian Church complete the document. The present location of all originals is unknown.