My Mother's Mother's Father, Who Had Been A Rich Virginia Planter Before He Fled (In What Must Have Been "Una Grande y Felicísima Armada" of a Wagon Train) From the Civil War then Convulsing the Southeastern United States, Diametrically Across the Continent, to Set Up Farming and Housekeeping in the Washington Territory,

Brought with him many of the highly civilized Customs, Usages and Material Appurtenances of the Daily Life of Old Virginie, including books, musical instruments, and household furniture. Life as he had known it in the Old South flowed on uninterrupted, and but little changed, in the austere vastness of the Western Frontier, where the prodigality of his and the woman whom he publicly  called "Mrs. Moore's" hospitality, and their infinitely obliging good manners, won them the universal respect and esteem of  their fellow settlers.  The Moores' week-long dancing parties were the sensation of the Territory--and might have consoled Margaret Mitchell, had she got to hear of them, for the loss of those deliciously protracted Barbecues at Twelve Oaks, which she supposed irrevocably 'Gone With the Wind.'

And yet.  Great-Gandpa Moore was not exactly a successful farmer in the virginal Northwest.  At least not at first.  His attempts at flax-farming and viticulture of the first years went quickly bust, and it wasn't till it dawned on him that the precipitation, which he'd judged meagre by Virginia standards, was yearly constant, without periods of drought, and entirely adequate for dry-land wheat-farming, that his fortunes began to improve.

All this I know from the living testimony of Ellen and Moses's youngest (of six) daughter(s), my grandmother, Alice Effie Moore, as she held me in her lap and recalled those glorious years in her life before she married my grandfather, when she had been "but a little bit of a thing, and oh so light on  my feet," dancing Reels and Schottishes and Waltzes and Quadrilles.

Only one thing, maybe, clouded her recollection of those carefree times--Her father, the genteel, the kindly and exquisitely hospitable southern gentleman, was, at least sometimes, a Vigilante, who, with his law-abiding neighbors, hunted down horse-thieves and hanged them.  And she remembered her mother asking, "But why, Moses?"  And her father answering, "Because someone has to do it, Ellen."