The Beginnings

For one hundred years commencing in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the primary form of transcontinental travel in the United States was by rail. The railroad ran on steam which was generated by the coal-fired boiler, making the various towns in Wyoming, which were separated by a network of six thousand miles of dirt roads, more accessible.

Towns such as Hanna could provide coal for rail transport. The trains of the Union Pacific Railroad ran east to west and west to east, and all stopped in Hanna for coal and water. Coal was mined in Hanna, and water was piped into Hanna from the hills near Elk Mountain, where it was stored in the Hanna reservoir. The importance of Hanna grew as coal became essential for other sources of energy, such as electricity, and the city became a prime target for men seeking work and also provided opportunities for those with entrepreneurial skills.

Hanna was a typical western town—the Wyoming breeze (a twenty-five-mile-per-hour wind) blew almost every day. Dust, tumbleweed, dogs, horses, the occasional feral cats, rats, mice, and sundry other animals from the nearby plains could be seen in the streets. The Ford Hotel (owned and operated by Mrs. Mary Ford, the widowed and later remarried mother of Dr. Stebner, the dentist) supplied comfortable accommodation for visitors, especially for schoolteachers who were brought in from other parts of the country to work in the local school. However, the schoolteachers were responsible for the costs of their own accommodation.

But this was not always the case, and the quality could vary, as a segment from the journal of Anna Doggett (who became Mother Anna) illustrates:

Before marrying Robert Milliken (Father Robert) I was a country school teacher when I first started to teach. My wages were from thirty five to fifty dollars per month over the period that I taught. Many of the small towns where I taught could not afford hotel accommodation so we were boarded in the town or the district around the town and usually fared fairly well. But it was anything but modern in terms of toilet facilities and comfort.

Sleeping accommodation did not always have any privacy—I once shared my bed with a nine year old girl. Another time I shared my room with the two children in the home—there was a curtain on a taught wire between my bed and the twin cots of the children.

The houses for the miners were simple and for the most part were owned by the Union Pacific Coal Company, and taxes on businesses were unknown. Virtually all businesses (with, it seems, the exception of the Ford Hotel) were owned by the coal company. Most of the houses had only cold water. Water was piped to each house, but the occupants were responsible for their own water heating, usually on the stove. The town water supply came courtesy of the Union Pacific Railroad from a dam in the nearby mountains that fed water into two reservoirs.

The company store provided most of the supplies and goods required by the families. The miners were paid in tokens (with an occasional cash payout) for use in the company store. The railroad also provided an ice house that was available to the Hanna populace. Ice was taken from a nearby frozen lake during the winter months.

A deputy sheriff lived in a house that sat on a hill overlooking the town, from where he could see most of the happenings in the town, some of which might be of concern to him. Any legal matters and differences in opinion, whatever the nature and cause, were first attended to by a lawyer whose name is lost in the mists of history, but he lived in Hanna and owned his own house. More serious cases were adjudicated by a judge in the law court at Rawlins.

It was into this environment that Robert Carl Milliken was born on June 6, 1922, at the Milliken home in Hanna. The birth was not easy for mother and baby. Fortunately, a doctor was present, and both mother and son survived.

But perhaps first things first ...

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The records of the Milliken name show an ancient origin (pre-1100 AD), and the name was first used by the ancient Strathclyde-Briton people of the Scottish-English border country. The first Milliken family lived in Wigtown, a former royal burgh in the Machars of Galloway (the Plains of Galloway) in the southwest of Scotland. This burgh was first mentioned in an indenture of 1292, and the sheriff of the area was in existence in 1263.

The saga of the Milliken family in the United States began in the mid-nineteenth century when William Milliken, a native of Scotland and Bob's paternal great-grandfather, moved to Ireland to live in the city of Newtownards, County Down, just a short distance from Dublin. He was a weaver by trade, and he, with his wife Mary, moved to Ireland to serve as a Presbyterian missionary. His zeal for expansion of the church was almost unmatched.

At that time there were several hundred Presbyterians living in the area, and Great-Grandfather William was trying to organize them into a distinct church group that was to follow the Presbyterian way of life. To this end, in 1853 he sent a note to the Presbyterian inhabitants of Newtownards with the following message:

It is now upward of a year since a number of individuals impressed with the spiritual destitution of the humbler classes of the Town, established the Newtownards Town Mission. The actual amount of destitution was brought out in the Report read at the public meeting, held in August last, from which it appeared that upward of 400 Presbyterian Families were wholly unconnected with any House of Worship. The readiness with which these families have availed themselves of the agency established for their benefit has been manifested in the large attendance at the various meetings held in connection with the Mission. The result has been that a large number of those families, having gradually become anxious for the enjoyment of more extended spiritual privileges than a Town Mission is able to afford, have originated a movement of the attainment of this object and already attached their names to a document declaring their desire to be formed into a Congregation in which all ordnances of the Gospel may be administered to them. Their aim is simply to procure the enjoyment of all the means of grace for themselves, without interfering in the slightest degree with an existing Congregational interest. As a considerable interval must elapse before a meeting of the Presbytery occurs, at which their case could be laid before it—to prevent the families who have subscribed their names being scattered, and what...