Bert Loper’s Wretched Roots

I am just back from a 5,500 mile road trip in search of the origins of the Grand Old Man of the Colorado, Bert Loper. Armed with two crates of cryptic and conflicting clues, I spent October in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado, sniffing, digging, and rooting through courthouses, libraries, cemeteries, and anywhere else my leads took me. Microfilm and ledgers, old books and older tombstones, days of tedium punctuated with moments of utter amazement. Well, I was amazed anyhow.
But before even leaving my driveway the hunt was on, mostly via internet. There was little known about Loper’s father—only that he left when Bert was young and died in Texas some time later. By sending out dozens of queries to chat groups, scouring genealogy sites and the U.S. Census, and following blind hunches, a picture slowly developed of a man named Jehial P. Loper. Or Jehail. Or Jehil, Jahiel, Jehile, Gehile, or just plain J.P.
He first showed up in the 1860 census for Bowling Green, Missouri with a wife, Ann, and three daughters. In 1862 he deserted the Union Army. By 1870, Ann was gone and he had married America Mettler at a tender sixteen years of age to his 36. They had birthed two boys, Andrew Jackson Loper and Albert A. Loper.

Yet by 1872, J.P. Loper was in Whitesboro, Texas alone, establishing a brickyard. Two years later he married for a third and final time, this time to a widow, Sarah Jane Smith Truly, with grown boys. But where was J.P. from? That continued elusive until I found a webpage mentioning a Ghile Loper as being a brother of the Lopers of Mulvane, Kansas. More on that another time. Once on the road I found a few true pearls. In the Whitesboro courthouse I found J.P. Loper’s will, wherein he disinherits both his sons, Bert and Jack. What a crumbball. I wondered why until I unearthed, in Bowling Green, divorce papers between Jehial P. and America Loper. After a fiery battle with accusations of adultery, abandonment, and abuse, J.P. apparently lost custody of his boys and left Missouri a bitter man—and apparently one who held grudges.
A few blocks north of Bowling Green’s courthouse I found America’s shattered tombstone among the collapsing Mettler graves. She died just four years after Jehial left, when she was 25 and Bert was six and a half. She had succumbed to the family bane, tuberculosis, which felled her sister Orpha Ann a decade earlier, brother Winnie just months after America, and their mother Teressa in 1882, when Bert was twelve. I wish I could say Bert’s life began to improve after that, but it didn’t. That would be a long time coming.

Brad Dimock