Biography of Adam G. Johnson

A well known and prominent citizen of the reservation country, being also influential throughout the country, for he was elected County commissioner, having a plurality of two hundred and forty-four. Mr. Johnson is entitled to a place among those represented in the County history and it is with pleasure that we accord the same to him.

Adams G. Johnson was born in Whiteside County, Illinois, on January 14, 1839, being the son of Jeremiah H. and Harriet M. (Getty) Johnson. The father was born in Washington County, New York, on December 12, 1797, and died in 1 87 1. The paternal grandfather of our subject was born in Vermont and died in 1852, aged eighty-four. This venerable gentleman had married Miss Parker, a native of the Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania. She removed from that fateful valley just three days before Chief Brant’s terrible massacre, going to the Mohawk valley in New York. Some of the Parker family fought in the Revolution. A brother of the lady mentioned was Captain Thomas Parker in the war of 1812. This man had two sons in the Civil war; one, Colonel Thomas Jefferson Parker, commanded the Thirty-fourth New York Infantry, and Captain Fred Parker was commander of a company of his regiment and he fell at the battle of Chancellorsville. Our subject’s father was related to Stephen Hopkins, the signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he bore the name of his illustrious ancestor, the middle initial indicating Hopkins. The family was also related to General Nathaniel Greene, of Revolutionary fame. The mother of our subject was born in Erie County, New York, in 1805 and died in 1872, being of Scotch Irish descent.

Adams G. was raised on a farm in Illinois and educated in the district schools there. In 1859, he and his father and some friends went to Osawattomie, Kansas, but returned the same year. Then our subject went to Pikes Peak and mined for a time, but as politics became heated, the southerners there threatening vengeance in case Lincoln was elected, Mr. Johnson returned to Illinois for the express purpose of voting for Lincoln. He made the journey with ox team.

Upon the breaking out of the war, Mr. Johnson enlisted in Graham’s Independent Rangers, a cavalry company, which was taken from Moline, Illinois, the place where Mr. Johnson went in as a corporal, to Ouincy and there mustered in. Thence they went to Fort Leavenworth then to the siege of Lexington, Missouri, where our subject was captured by Price. Being paroled he went home, but later was discharged at St. Louis and then reenlisted in the Eighth Kansas Infantry, Company I, under Captain H. C. Austin, and he served until the close of the war. He was in detached and garrison duty much of this time. Mr. Johnson was mustered out on November 4, 1864, at St. Louis, after which he served one year as auditing clerk in the commissary under Captain Hollis Steadman. Then he went to raising cotton in Arkansas, later kept hotel in Moline. Illinois, for a time, and in 1871 he came to The Dalles, Oregon.

His family having gone to California to visit relatives, they joined him later and for a decade he raised sheep and farmed. He was deputy sheriff, then deputy United States marshal and other official positions occupied by him until 1895, when he came to Genesee. Idaho, and at the opening of the reservation he came hither, and in 1898 he filed on his present place, three miles south from Nez Perce. He has a good farm and does general farming.

Mr. Johnson married Miss Mary E. Hogue on October 29, 1866. Her parents, James M. and Emma (Ridgeway) Hogue, lived in Newcastle, Placer County, California, the father being of Scotch descent and a native of Tennessee, while the mother was born in Philadelphia and was of English extraction. Two children have been born to this marriage, Hollis C, a dentist and dealer in mines, in Columbus, Montana; Emma, wife of S. B. McCullough, a stockman in Idaho County. Mr. Johnson has one sister, Helen S. Young, a widow in Geneseo, Illinois.

Mr. Johnson is a Republican and active in the political field, always being allied on the side of progress and improvement.

Source: An Illustrated History of North Idaho: Embracing Nez Perce, Idaho, Latah, Kootenai and Shoshone counties, state of Idaho; Western Historical Publishing Company, 1903

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