George Benson Kuykendall Papers, 1881-1931

George Benson Kuykendall was born in Indiana in 1843 and emigrated to Oregon with is parents in 1852. He graduated from the Willamette University Medical School in 1872 and began his first medical practice as Agency Physician on the Yakima Indian Reservation at Fort Simcoe, Washington. In 1883 he left the Indian Agency and established an independent practice at Pomeroy, Washington, where he remained until his retirement in 1920. He died at Portland, Oregon, in 1939.

While at Fort Simcoe, Kuykendall began collecting Indian legends and stories. In later years this project was to be expanded into an effort at collecting local history and reminiscences. Some of Kuykendall’s historical and ethnological writing can be found in The West Shore (1887) and the Oregon Historical Quarterly (1918). Although Kuykendall continued to collect some local and personal history until the mid-1920s, about 1905 the main object of his research became a genealogy and history of the Kuykendall Family in North American. The family history proved to be a large project and ultimately it involved 15 years of research and considerable travel. Eventually, Kuykendall was able to trace his ancestors to New York in 1650 and was able to establish the connections between the Kuykendalls, Coykendalls, Kirkendalls and other variant names. The results were published in 1919 in the "History of the Kuykendall Family since its Settlement in Dutch New York in 1646, With Genealogy as Found in Early Dutch Church Records, State and Government Documents, Together With Sketches of Colonial Times, Old Log Cabin Days, Indian Wars, Pioneers Hardships, Social Customs, Dress and Mode of Living of the Early Forefathers" (Portland, Ore.: Kilham Stationery and Printing Company, 1919).

Not satisfied with a simple genealogy, Kuykendall attempted to make the family history more completed by interspersing American social history in such a way as to provide the backdrop for the lives of the various generation of Kuykendalls. His effort, however, were not very successful and the result was an unconnected section of the book filled with several chapters of social history, some of it of rather legendary nature. Additionally the book contained long passages consisting of quotations of letters which Kuykendall received in response to inquiries for information. As he neither transferred the information from the letters to a narrative nor completed the attempted at social history, the book appears to have been published before it was complete, with large portions of it appearing more like notes than a completed text. Disregarding the literary merit of the volume, it does contain considerable information about many plain Americans over a span of 250 years. Moreover, while it may not be the best of the lot, it is exemplary of the products coming out of the wave of genealogical activity in the United States in the early years of the 20th Century.