The story of this generation is the story of a family in motion. It begins in the hill country and small farming districts of central Arkansas, where a young man of settled Southern stock married a girl carried west out of Tennessee, and it ends in the desert cities of Arizona, where their descendants finally came to rest. Between those two points lies the long journey west to the Pecos, the migration that gives this chapter its shape.
George Redmon Pate and the Marriage at Wooster
George Redmon Pate came of age in the settled farming districts of Faulkner County, Arkansas, the country in which he had grown up and where he would spend the whole of his early adulthood. On 2 January 1898, at Wooster in that county, he married Hattie Elizabeth Holt. It was a union that joined the Pates to the Holts of Tennessee, and it began a household that would eventually cross three states.
Hattie's roots lay to the east. She had been born on 6 August 1879 at Medina, in Gibson County, Tennessee, the daughter of Ezekiel Hutson Holt and Louranie Adkins Heath. The West Tennessee of her childhood was a land of small farms and cotton, still rebuilding in the generation after the Civil War. At some point in her youth her family joined the broad current of Southern families moving west into Arkansas in search of fresh farmland, and it was there that she came of age and, at eighteen, married George.
The couple settled near Union City in Faulkner County, and there they raised a large family. Over the years Hattie bore eleven children, ten of whom lived to be counted among the family: Hazel Leona, Redmon Roma, Henry French, Charles "Z" Ezekiel, Ray Andrew, Montine Adeline, Rupert Harlan, Francis, Annie Josephine, and Georgie Lou. Among the losses were an infant born and died the same day in September 1902, and the child Francis, born in Arkansas in 1917, who died in childhood at Lake Arthur in 1923. Such sorrows shadowed even the largest and most careful households of the age. Around them, the Pate family continued to grow, and the 1900 and 1910 censuses both found them still near Union City, farming and raising their brood within the Arkansas landscape that had shaped both parents.
The Move West to the Pecos Valley
The great turning point of the family's life came in the years following 1910. Sometime after that census, and by George's own reckoning by 1921, the Pates left Arkansas behind and joined the migration into the Pecos Valley of southeastern New Mexico. The 1920 census recorded them at Otis, in Eddy County; by 1930 they had settled at Lake Arthur, in neighboring Chaves County. It was no small undertaking for a man then in his forties or fifties, with a household of that size to provide for — a decision that reveals both the hardship pushing families off worn Southern farms and the hope drawing them toward the irrigated Southwest.
The country they came to was unlike anything they had known in Tennessee or Arkansas. Southeastern New Mexico was a landscape in dramatic transition, and water was the limiting factor in everything. The region's native aridity had long made it inhospitable to settlement, but the Pecos River, flowing north to south through Chaves and Eddy counties, offered a reliable source, and the development of irrigation from that river — and from artesian wells — opened the valley to families willing to stake their futures on cotton, alfalfa, and orchard crops. Lake Arthur, situated on the river, became a modest agricultural hub, a small community oriented entirely toward serving the irrigated farmland around it. This was not the frontier of cattle ranches and open range but a more settled landscape of small farms, irrigation ditches, and the constant labor of keeping the desert from reclaiming the green strips along the water.
As the decades turned, the character of the region shifted again. While farming remained important in the river valleys, oil and gas development increasingly drove the economy of Eddy County. Artesia, the larger town to the south, emerged as a center of petroleum activity; by the 1930s and 1940s oil derricks dotted the landscape, and towns that had been sleepy trading posts grew with newcomers drawn by wages. The census records of these decades show the Pates scattered across this dual economy — some, like George, remaining rooted in agricultural work at Lake Arthur, others gravitating toward the oil towns of Artesia and Carlsbad.
At Lake Arthur, George put down roots that held for more than two decades. By 1940 the census again found him there, approaching seventy, an established resident of the town he had come to only in middle age. His children, born in Arkansas, had grown to adulthood in New Mexico. George Redmon Pate died on 14 November 1944 at Lake Arthur, a month past his seventy-fourth birthday, having traced the arc of a generation of Southern farmers who left the land of their fathers to seek their fortunes in the West.
Hattie's Long Widowhood
Hattie outlived her husband by more than twenty years and became the family's enduring matriarch. By the early 1950s she had settled at Artesia, where she made her home for some twenty-two years; she was recorded there in the 1950 census and was living in the town in 1953. A member of the First Methodist Church, she belonged to the kind of congregation that anchored much of small-town New Mexico life. Outside town lay the ranch land associated with the family, and around her stretched the great crowd of her offspring. Those who remembered her recalled the particulars that outlast dates — the size of her brood, and her fondness in old age for watching wrestling.
In 1965, in advanced age, she left Artesia and moved to Odessa, in Ector County, Texas, to live with her daughter Georgie Lou. She died on the morning of 17 June 1967 at Medical Center Hospital in Odessa, following a long illness, at the age of eighty-seven. Funeral services were held at the First Methodist Church of Artesia, the town that had been her home for more than two decades, and she was buried in Woodbine Cemetery there — returned, in death, to the New Mexico ground where she had spent the greater part of her long life.
The Children's Dispersal
The Pate children came of age across two states and then scattered widely across the Southwest. Hazel Leona, the eldest, was born in 1899 while the family still lived in Arkansas; she married Martin Ewing Wylie. Redmon Roma, born in 1900 at Wooster, settled in Artesia, where he lived much of his life alongside residences in Strong, Arkansas, and died there in 1982. Henry French, born in 1903, moved to Odessa, keeping a residence at 4220 Winchester — the same address where his mother would spend her final years — before spending time in Artesia; he died in Odessa in 1974. Charles "Z" Ezekiel, born in Arkansas in 1906, moved to Fresno, California, and remained there until his death in 1971.
Ray Andrew, born in 1909, married Edna Jewel Cavin in 1934 and settled near his father at Lake Arthur, where he died in 1972. Rupert Harlan, born in 1914 at Vilonia, Arkansas, made his life in the New Mexico oil fields, married Ruth Wassenaar in 1954, and spent his final decades in Carlsbad, where he died in 2001. Of the youngest daughters, Annie Josephine was born in 1920 at Carlsbad; she married Herbert Mathis in 1945 and settled in Tucson, living there until her death in 2013. Georgie Lou, born in 1922, also made her home in Tucson after her years in Odessa, and died there in 2016. Both of the youngest daughters ended their lives in Tucson — the city toward which this book is heading.
Montine Adeline Pate
At the center of the family's turn toward Arizona stands Montine Adeline Pate, known to her grandchildren as Mimi. She was born on 5 September 1911 in Faulkner County, Arkansas, and spent her earliest years in the small farming communities of Vilonia and Wooster before being carried west with the rest of the family — to Otis by 1920 and to Lake Arthur by 1930. She was remembered for her beauty and her style, for the fashionable clothes she wore, and, in later years, for the time she spent working at an expensive women's shop in Phoenix.
Around 1930, at roughly nineteen, Montine married Edward John McWenie Jr. She was living in Lake Arthur at the time of the 1930 census, having been in Carlsbad the year before. Edward, whose origins lay in the railroad town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, made his career as a supervising foreman for the Mountain States Telephone Company — a position of responsibility in one of the essential industries of the modern West, overseeing the crews that strung lines and built networks across the vast and difficult terrain of the desert Southwest.
The demands of that work help explain the couple's pattern of movement, which reads like a map of the region. Edward was recorded in Las Vegas through the mid-1930s, where their son Frederick James McWenie was born; by 1939 the family had moved to El Paso, Texas, and by the census of 1 April 1940 they were established in Tucson, where they remained through 1950. The couple raised two children, Frederick and Patricia Ann.
In 1942, with the nation newly at war, Montine trained as a home nurse. Her decision reflected the pressures of the home front: professional nurses were being drawn into military service and war-industry medical work in enormous numbers, leaving civilian communities short of skilled care. Women like Montine stepped into the gap, learning to tend the sick and the aging in private homes — practical, needed work carried on not overseas but in the households of their own communities.
Her marriage to Edward did not last. After her divorce, Montine drew on her taste and poise to make her own way, working at the Phoenix dress shop that suited her natural elegance. She married three times in all — after Edward came Briggs W. Flack, whom she had wed by 1980, and then Robert Mario Calvani, whom she married on 5 February 1982 in Tucson. Tucson remained her home through her final decades, and it was there that she died on 10 August 1996, at the age of eighty-four.
Edward, meanwhile, had settled with the family in Phoenix by 1975 — the city that had grown, over his lifetime, from a modest agricultural town into the sprawling metropolis of the desert. He died there on 12 September 1979, at the age of sixty-seven, having lived his entire life within the American Southwest, from the high plains of New Mexico where he was born to the desert valleys of Arizona where he made his home.
The Next Generation
Edward and Montine's two children carried the family forward in Arizona. Frederick James McWenie, born in New Mexico in 1932, made his home in Phoenix, where he remained until his death in 2002.
His younger sister, Patricia Ann McWenie, was born at Douglas, Arizona, in 1945, thirteen years his junior. It is with her that the whole southwestern side of the book carries into its final chapter.