A Family History
From the villages of Gascony and the lodges of the Omaha Nation, two lineages flowed across an ocean and a continent to converge on the Nebraska frontier.
For Rodney Dale Sailors
It begins with tributaries you cannot see — streams that branched centuries ago, in countries you may never have heard mentioned at the dinner table. This is the story of yours.
In the 1730s, a man named Jean Barada lived in the Gascony region of southern France. His son would cross an ocean. His grandson would help found a city. His great-grandson would build a fur trading fort on the Missouri River and marry into the most powerful family of the Omaha Nation.
At the same time, somewhere in the forests of eastern Nebraska, a woman called Tae-Gleha — "Laughing Buffalo" — lived among her people. Her brother would become the greatest chief the Omaha had ever known. And the child she would bear with a French fur trader would give rise to a folk hero whose name would be etched into the map of Nebraska itself.
Seven generations later, their blood flows in you.
Born in the ancient town of St-Flour in the volcanic highlands of southern France, Antoine crossed the Atlantic to the colonial frontier. He married Marguerite DesRosiers in 1759 at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Vincennes, Indiana — the oldest French settlement in the Midwest. He then became one of the first settlers of St. Louis, Missouri, where he witnessed the British-led attack on the city in 1780. His son Michel was born on Rue Royale in what was then Spanish Louisiana.
Antoine's parents — Jean Barada and Jean Dupin — are the earliest known ancestors on this line. They lived in Gascony, the same region that produced d'Artagnan of The Three Musketeers. Their grandson would travel further than any of them could have imagined.
Michel joined James Mackay's expedition up the Missouri River in 1795, working for the Company of Explorers of the Upper Missouri, a Spanish-licensed fur trading venture. When the expedition reached the great Omaha village of Tonwantonga — 1,100 people living in earth lodges — they built Fort Charles, a stockade with corner bastions, just one mile from the village. Named for King Charles IV of Spain.
Michel stayed for over a decade. He trapped, traded, interpreted. And sometime around 1806, he married the sister of the most powerful man on the Missouri.
A full-blood Omaha woman of the InshtaOsunda Clan of the Thunder Clan. Also known as TonOingthihe — "the sudden appearance of the new moon." She was the sister of the man who would become the most consequential leader in Omaha history. Very little is documented about her personal life — Native women in fur trade marriages are severely under-recorded in the historical record. But the lineage she created would shape Nebraska for two centuries.
Tae-Gleha's brother rose to become principal chief after the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1800 killed nearly 400 of the 1,100 Omaha people, including Chief Blackbird. A warrior in his youth against the Pawnee, Big Elk became a renowned orator and diplomat, traveling to Washington D.C. in 1821 and 1837.
He adopted Joseph LaFlesche (Iron Eye) as his successor. LaFlesche's descendants include Susan LaFlesche Picotte — the first Native American woman to earn a medical degree — and Susette LaFlesche, journalist and civil rights activist.
Big Elk didn't just lead through oratory. He built a network of European alliances by marrying his family members into the most powerful fur trading dynasties on the Missouri. These "country marriages" — conducted under Native customs, without clergy — transformed outsiders into kin.
November 1795. James Mackay's expedition reaches the Omaha village six miles below present-day Homer, Nebraska. They begin building a stockade. Michel Barada is among them.
After Antoine Barada Jr. died in 1885, a romantic story began to circulate about how his parents met. It was too good not to repeat. And for decades, people believed it.
Michel was a young French count strolling through Paris when a rose fell at his feet from a window above. He looked up and saw a beautiful dark-haired Omaha woman — Tae-Gleha — visiting Paris as part of a French government showcase. She departed for America before he could speak to her. So he converted his entire fortune to cash, sailed to Montreal, and spent ten years as a fur trapper searching the wilderness for the woman who had thrown the rose. He found her at the Omaha village.
Michel was a fur trapper's son from St. Louis who joined an expedition up the Missouri in 1795 and lived at the Omaha village for over a decade. He married the chief's sister in a strategic diplomatic alliance. No roses. No Paris. No searching. Just two people on the frontier, bound together by trade, survival, and the politics of two colliding worlds.
Louise Pound debunked the legend in her 1949 paper for the Nebraska State Historical Society.
The manuscript that started it — E.D. Saunders' "Indian Romance" (1937) —
is held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas.
The son of Michel and Tae-Gleha became a legendary frontiersman — famous for superhuman feats of strength that earned him the title "Nebraska's Paul Bunyan." He settled on the Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation with a 320-acre land patent. The town of Barada, Nebraska is named for his family. His granddaughter, Mary Ann Peters, would marry into the Sailors family — connecting this entire lineage to yours.
Antoine's daughter Euphrasia Catherine Barada married a man named Peters. Their daughter, Mary Ann Peters (1859–1949), grew up in Richardson County — the very land her grandfather had helped secure through the Half-Breed Treaty.
And in this same stretch of Nebraska, the Sailors family had arrived.
The Sailors family — likely German or Pennsylvania Dutch in origin — moved west in waves across a century. From Pennsylvania to the Abbeville District of South Carolina, then north to Rush County, Indiana, where Thomas Sailors and his brothers Conrad, Jacob, and Benjamin were among the founding pioneers of Noble Township.
Justice of the Peace in Rush County, Indiana. His home served as the polling place for Noble Township in 1822. Part of a group of Sailors brothers who were among the earliest settlers of the county.
Married Asenath Scott on January 23, 1834 in Rush County. They had eight children. George died young at 40. Asenath — "Grandma Sailors" — brought the family to Nebraska in 1868, settling in Richardson County. She lived to 86, leaving "seven children and about fifty grandchildren and great grandchildren."
"Generally known as Grandma Sailors, died Wednesday of last week at the ripe old age of 86, at the home of her son George Sailors. She was born in Kentucky and emigrated to Indiana in girlhood. She came to Nebraska in 1868, locating in Richardson County where three sons and numerous descendants now live."
Trenton Leader, April 7, 1899 — Obituary of Asenath (Scott) SailorsThe Sailors family settled in Richardson County. The Barada family had been there for decades. The town itself bore their name. It was inevitable that they would meet.
Lot George Sailors — the youngest son of George Washington and Asenath — married Mary Ann Peters, the granddaughter of Antoine Barada Jr. and great-granddaughter of Tae-Gleha "Laughing Buffalo." The two rivers finally merged. Mary Ann carried the blood of the Omaha Nation and the fur traders of French Louisiana into the Sailors family tree. Their son Garl was born in Barada, Nebraska — the town named for Mary Ann's own ancestors.
Garl married Elsie Cora Keyser in 1906. Elsie's family came from a different thread entirely — the Keyser line traces to Henry Keyser (1813–1909) of Giles County, Virginia. Her parents were Leonard Mitchell Keyser and Mary Almira DeLozier. Together, Garl and Elsie raised fifteen children in Rosalie, Nebraska.
Fifteen children grew up in Rosalie, Nebraska. Among them: teachers, soldiers, farmers. Two served in World War II. One coached for 37 years. One died in an automobile accident. And one — the eighth — was your grandfather.
The eighth child of Garl and Elsie. Served as a Technical Sergeant with the 57th Station Hospital in World War II. Married Argean Alice Alderson on May 22, 1946 in Wayne, Nebraska. Noted on his memorial as carrying 1/32 Omaha Tribe heritage — the thread that traces all the way back to Tae-Gleha and Michel at Fort Charles.
He and Argean had three children: Nancy Lynn (1947–1996), Rodney Dale, and Kim.
Garlie died at 48 in Hendricks, Minnesota. He is buried at Dakota City Cemetery in Dakota County, Nebraska — Plot: East Addition, South Driveway, Space 105.
His son Rodney would carry the story forward.
From Tae-Gleha to you. Seven generations. The fraction diminishes with each generation, but the story does not.
Your 5th great-grandmother was an Omaha woman of the Thunder Clan. Your 5th great-grandfather was a French fur trader born on Rue Royale in St. Louis. Your 6th great-grandfather was born in the volcanic highlands of southern France. Your 7th great-grandfather lived in Gascony.
And a town in Nebraska — where your great-great-grandfather Garl was born — still bears the name of the family that started it all.
Converging on Richardson County, Nebraska