- Life Story
The following is shared by the oldest grandson of Mary Alta (Roney) Cowherd from an email that Lloyd N. Cowherd wrote:
"My grandmother Mary Alta Roney Cowherd had a younger, wilder, sister named Effa Toma Roney, who at age 16, ran off with a drummer (traveling salesman, employer unkown). No marriage has been found. She later wrote to her favorite sister Mary, that she lived in Rand, CO, and was married to a wealthy rancher named Henning J. Peterson. After his death she lived in a relatively small cabin in Rand, which is near the Wyoming border about half way across Colorado, in a wide valley between two large mountain ranges. When we visited her in 1948, she banished her live-in hired hand to a smaller furnished cabin in the back yard, while we were there. She later married him and became Mrs. Troy Ridings. After she was again widowed, Barbara and I stopped by her cabin in 1978 and she was just coming out of the smaller cabin covered with blood, from butchering a deer she had shot up in the Rabbit Ears Range of mountains south of her home. She announced that she had, for the first time in her life, purchased a license, then went hunting, shot the deer, field dressed it, hung it in a tree to cool, and the following day, had driven her old jeep to get it. She offered us tea, after I had explained that our last meeting had been while we were in Colorado in 1948. I was impressed by her activite life at age 87. We moved on to Denver, Colorado Springs, and into New Mexico, before diverting eastward to Texas, and then stopped with another of my grandmother's sisters, Martha Mary Roney, who had married Homer Samuel Hawkins, formerly of Norborne, MO, who had made a fortune growing wheat in the boom times after World War I, near Texoma, on the Oklahoma panhandle, Texas panhandle, border. He lost all of his land during the Depression, managing only to keep the taxes paid on one section (640 acres) of practically worthless land. Before 1940 and so before World War II, oil was struck on his worthless land, and he was suddenly back in the wheat growing business, making a very comfortable living during that war. Another sister had married a man, George Garnier, who took over the gravestone business in Kansas City, Kansas, after the father Benjamin Franklin Roney, sold his land in Fairfield Township, and invested in making tombstones. There were other sisters and a brother. Their mother was Emma (Petty) Roney."
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Abt 1891 - Aft 1977 (> 87 years)
