Clark County sleuths unravel family story of feud in Arkansas

SIFTON — It may have occurred nearly two centuries ago, but frontier violence among their Arkansas ancestors always weighed heavily on Lethene Parks and her family.

“It was a family story told by my grandmother about my great grandmother,” Parks said. That great grandmother was a shocked, uncomprehending 9-year-old in 1836, when her brother announced that he must change his name to Johnson, and disappear forever — a fugitive from justice.

Parks and her daughter, Cathy Sato, recall hearing the story repeated in a similar state of shock and grief by that 9-year-old’s daughter, Parks’ grandmother — who hadn’t yet been born when it happened.

“It was very emotional when she told it,” said Sato, who lives in Silverdale. “I could see her acting out all the parts on her face.”

“She still grieved the loss of a child and the family separation,” said Parks, who lives in Sifton. “The women are the careful storytellers. The stories always come out.”

Do they always? Not without a lot of help, sometimes. Parks and Sato spent years digging into the complicated story — motivated, they said, by a legacy of murder that stayed fresh and painful across generations. All her life, Sato said, she has grappled with confusion, sorrow and guilt that have nothing to do with her, but everything to do with her family’s history.

The mother-and-daughter team have the right skills to research a major family mystery: Sato is a retired classroom teacher, and Parks a retired librarian with a bachelor’s degree in history and, as of a few weeks ago, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Clark County Genealogical Society.

In 2005, after logging years of research, Sato emailed a stranger named Dale Lasater with a jarring statement: “I think our ancestors shot each other.”

She worried about Lasater’s response, but it came quickly: “Tell me more.”

Arkansas

In 1836, two Arkansas land speculators and politicians, the sons of Revolutionary War veterans, squabbled over everything from election chicanery to the location of a proposed courthouse for Crawford County. Their grievances were aired in the court of public opinion: angry, accusatory letters published in The Arkansas Gazette.

Businessman William Whitson, the ancestor of Parks and Sato, owned the general store where the Crawford County court convened. That brought him sweet revenues on court days. He was also a representative in the Arkansas Legislature. But in 1836, his neighbor and rival John Lasater, who wanted the county court on his own land, unseated Whitson in an election (the vote was 337 to 280) and took his place in the Legislature.

Whitson accused Lasater, in print, of numerous lies and tricks — including winning the election by spreading the lie that Whitson, whose name was on the ballot, was dead.

Lasater furiously replied, also in the paper: “I pronounce you a base, envious, malicious slanderer, and shall take no further notice of your false publications.”

In that context, trading charges and insults was usually the wind-up to a gentlemanly pistol duel, Parks and Sato said. But according to their research, Lasater was approaching Whitson’s store when Whitson snuck up from behind and pistol-whipped him — a most ungentlemanly assault.

Both men fired their guns in the scuffle that followed. Lasater was wounded but recovered; William Whitson, age 44, died on the spot. It’s a cruel wrinkle of history, Parks and Sato said, that Arkansas law required selling off the husband’s property if there was no will. Whitson’s widow had to do that. She moved to Tennessee in despair and poverty.

John Lasater was acquitted of murder on grounds of self defense. But Parks and Sato point to evidence that he knew more trouble was in store. Two years later, on Oct. 3, 1838, Lasater made a will; a week after that, on Oct. 10, William Whitson’s oldest son, John Whitson, stepped out from hiding and blasted Lasater, his father’s killer, with a shotgun loaded with rifle balls. A most ungentlemanly and cold-blooded murder.

Why did John Whitson wait two years for revenge? Parks and Sato believe it’s because his own brother-in-law was the county sheriff, and John Whitson was waiting out the end of that term. He didn’t want to make his brother-in-law have to chase him down.

A $1,000 bounty on his head, John Whitson visited his miserable mother and 9-year-old sister in Tennessee, announced that his new name was Johnson, said farewell and fled.

California

The story doesn’t end there. John Whitson apparently went east, then south, then west. He still followed his plan to become a doctor. He also became a husband and a father, and his family landed in California — where he seems to have lead a sterling life.

How did Parks and Sato pick up his trail? Painstaking detective work that involved three trips to Arkansas as well as patient digging into census and genealogical records, newspaper stories, maps, local history books and much more. The clue that helped them the most, they said, was knowing that Whitson’s assumed name was Johnson. From that, Parks said, she was able to pick up a “trail of bread crumbs” that connect the two names — chiefly, she said, the consistency with which Johnson’s children appear to be named after beloved figures from Whitson’s life.

In the late 1850s, Sato writes, Dr. T.D. Johnson “lived in San Jose California, where he oversaw the county hospital, treated indigent smallpox patients, and delivered the son of … survivors of the infamous Donner Party.” He tended the poor but hobnobbed with the fancy, which helped the historical record, Parks and Sato said. He apparently had some mental health challenges. He died in 1875, at age 56, when he was thrown from a buggy.

“The story is that his wife did not know of his dark past until late in their marriage and after she found out his secret, she never spoke to him again,” Sato writes.

Others embraced the past. Some T.D. Johnson descendants retain that last name, but others have gone back to being Whitsons. Some moved to farmland in Washington; Lethene Parks, the great granddaughter of William Whitson, owns that farmland today.

There’s much more to the saga uncovered by Parks and Sato across years of visits to libraries, archives and cemeteries. They found the grave of John Lasater in Van Buren, Ark., and the grave of Dr. T.D. Johnson in Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose, Calif. They even uncovered an eerily similar incident in the Lasater family, decades later — a shooting death and a drive for revenge that was dissuaded by family members who “would have good reason to know why vengeance did not have a good result,” Sato writes.

“This kind of stuff happened all the time,” said Parks.

“When the men pulled out their pistols and settled their scores in whatever way, honorable or not,” said Sato, “the women were the collateral damage.”

Colorado

In 2010, Parks and Sato traveled to the home of Dale and Janine Lasater in Colorado Springs, Colo. Dale was a rancher who fed Parks “the best steak I’ve ever had,” she said. He has passed away since then, but Parks and Sato keep in touch with his widow, and cherish the reunion that finally laid to rest generations of regret, resentment and mystery.

“People carried this for five generations,” Sato said. “I felt like a rock rolled off my shoulders.”

Dale Lasater took Parks and Sato to a Colorado Springs city park called the Garden of the Gods, they said. That’s a historic (and prehistoric) site known to have been a peaceful gathering place for different tribes, thousands of years ago, who laid down their weapons before entering there.

Lasater “did that intentionally,” Lethene Parks said. “It was a gesture of peace.”