The children of Charles Calvin Cooper and Anna Elizabeth Bartosh came into the world across a broad sweep of the northern plains and upper Midwest — from the Dakotas to Iowa to the lake country of northern Minnesota. Their lives, spanning the twentieth century, carried them steadily westward, and by the end most had settled in and around Spokane, Washington. Some died as small children; others lived into their eighties and nineties. Together their stories trace a family in motion, following work and one another across the map. This chapter follows that migration to its western terminus, where the Cooper line converged with the Petrie family through the marriage of Gladys May Cooper and Robert Petrie.
The Cooper Children
Edwin Theodore Cooper — from Charle’s first marriage — was born on 28 July 1904 in Ellendale, Dickey County, North Dakota. He married Helen Kathleen Cox on 3 November 1924 and lived across the state of Washington — in Colfax, Winthrop, Tucannon, Pomeroy, and finally Yakima, where he died on 10 September 1977.
William Perry Cooper — adopted son from Anna’s first marriage — born on 16 March 1911 in Cresco, Howard County, Iowa, married Marcella Marjorie Kolkema on 6 December 1931. His life followed the same westward path, with residences in Lisbon, North Dakota; Saco, Montana; and eventually the Spokane area. He settled in Mead, in Spokane County, where he died on 19 November 1993.
Eva Rose Rosecello Cooper was born on 13 December 1916 in Christine, Richland County, North Dakota. She married William “Bill” Merrill Albert on 18 May 1938 and made her way west through residences ranging from Eagle, North Dakota, and Maple Ridge, Minnesota, to Nine Mile Falls and Spokane. She died in Spokane on 26 May 2005, the last of her generation.
George Thomas Cooper, born 1 August 1919 in Christine, Richland County, North Dakota, died as a small child on 21 December 1922 in Beltrami County, Minnesota. His name would be given again to a brother born a few years later.
Sadie Harriet Cooper was born on 27 November 1922 in Buzzle, Beltrami County, Minnesota. She married Ralph Paul (Goodell) Robinson on 25 February 1939, and her later life was spent in Montana's Flathead country — in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Whitefish — where she died on 30 December 1999.
The second son to bear the name George Thomas Cooper was born on 27 August 1925 in Pinewood, Buzzle, Beltrami County, Minnesota, three years after the death of the first. He married Gwen E. Aiken on 30 December 1958 and lived variously in Bemidji, Minnesota, in Stevens County, Washington, and in Spokane, where he died on 11 November 1975.
Gladys May Cooper
Gladys May Cooper was born on 8 September 1914 in Lisbon, in Ransom County, North Dakota. The North Dakota of her childhood was a land of open prairie and homestead farms, where families lived by the rhythm of planting and harvest and where the winters were long and hard. She spent her earliest years there; by 1920 the family was living in Eagle, in Richland County, still within the wheat country of the eastern part of the state.
By her middle childhood the family had crossed into Minnesota. In 1926 she was recorded at Bemidji, in Beltrami County, and by 1930 the household had settled in nearby Maple Ridge — the north woods of Minnesota, lake country and timber country, a region whose economy leaned on logging and small farms carved out of the forest. It was in this setting that the shape of her adult life would begin to take form.
She learned early what it meant to feed a crew of hungry loggers. On the strength of a marriage begun at a country dance, Gladys found herself cooking in a logging camp, ladling out meals for men who worked the timber — before life carried her westward to a long career in the operating rooms of Spokane.
Robert Petrie
Robert Petrie — known to family as Bob — was born on 16 November 1904 in Wilton, Beltrami County, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Liberty Township. He was one of five children of John Petrie, Sr. and Gertrude Marie Helbig — one of four sons, alongside brothers Mathias, Alfred, and John Jr., with a single sister, Marie. The family lived in and around Liberty and Turtle Lake townships through the census years of 1910, 1920, and 1930, in the pine and lake country of northern Minnesota where logging shaped much of daily life.
At some point the family name had been written as Petri; the story handed down is that Robert added the "e" to make it sound “less Polish,” a small but telling gesture around the time of the family's westward move. As a young man he worked in a logging camp, hard and seasonal labor typical of the region, and he later took up trucking and carpentry as well.
Robert met Gladys at a dance, and the two were married on 4 October 1932 at Bemidji. He was twenty-eight, she was eighteen. They held their wedding dance at the Deer Lake Community Club, and Bob later recalled with some pride that it drew the largest crowd the hall had seen to that date. Over the next five years the couple welcomed three sons — Milton Ronald, Vern Robert, and Dale Richard — all born before the family's great move west.
The early years of the marriage were tied to the timber. Gladys and Robert ran a logging camp, and it was Gladys who served as camp cook, preparing meals for the loggers who depended on hearty food to sustain their labor. It was demanding, physical work, carried out in rough conditions, and it placed her at the very center of a working community's daily life.
The Journey West - A House On a Truck
By the mid-1930s many people were leaving Minnesota for the West, and two of Robert's brothers, Alfred and Mathias, were among them. Their encouragement, along with that of friends already settled, finally drew Robert and Gladys to follow in 1937. Robert acquired a small house — roughly eight by ten or twelve feet — from Oscar Richmond and mounted it on the back of his truck. Into it the family packed their possessions and cleared space to sleep, tying a stove and a washing machine to the back. With their three young children — the oldest about four, the youngest still a baby — they set out over rough gravel roads on a slow journey, camping at night along the way.
Somewhere in a river valley in the mountains of Montana they stopped to camp for a while. Deciding it was time to wash clothes, they lifted the wood stove and gas-operated washer down from the truck, heated river water in a boiler, and hung the wash on limbs and bushes and spread it on the grass to dry in the bright sun. Family memory holds that Bob had been heading for Denver, but a snowstorm forced the decision to turn toward Spokane instead. Along the way they lived for a short while in Conrad, Montana, where Bob worked before pressing on, and stopped with friends in western Montana. For a time they also owned and operated a store in Wallace, Idaho, in the silver-mining country of the Idaho panhandle. Because they moved about so much in those years, they do not appear in the 1940 census.
At last they came to Spokane, where Bob's brothers lived — the city set in the eastern part of Washington where the timber and mining country of the Inland Northwest met the farm lands of the Palouse, a natural destination for a couple whose roots were in the northern forests.
A Life in Spokane
In Spokane, Bob found work at several jobs before settling into construction, where he rose to foreman and did quite well. Gladys built a working life far from the logging camps of her early marriage, becoming an operating room nurse — a role that demanded steadiness, precision, and stamina. The transition from camp cook to surgical nurse speaks to a woman who was capable and adaptable in whatever setting she found herself. From that point forward, Spokane was home, and her residence there ran in an unbroken thread across the decades.
Even so, the ties to Minnesota were not cut. Bob and Gladys often traveled back to Bemidji to visit family. One such visit passed into family memory: when they stopped to see Robert's brother John, he offered Gladys a horse blanket for the night. Unimpressed by the hospitality, she declared that if that was all he was going to give her, it would be the last time they came to visit. The couple enjoyed betting on horse races, bought two lots in New Mexico, and made trips to California to see relatives, always returning with a big sack of walnuts.
They remained a remarkably lively pair into old age. In 1996, when Bob was ninety-one and Gladys in her eighties, they drove to Albuquerque on business and then on to Minnesota, Gladys doing most of the driving while Bob would take the wheel for fifty miles at a stretch to give her a rest. They visited family and many friends and were remembered by their Minnesota relatives as lively, healthy, and a pleasure to visit. They had planned to make the trip again in the fall of 1997, but Bob suffered a stroke, and the journey was called off.
Gladys died in Spokane on 24 April 2002, at the age of eighty-seven, and was buried there. Robert followed her later that same year, on 14 December 2002, at the age of ninety-eight, and was buried in Spokane as well.
The Next Generation
Three sons carried forward the name Bob had shaped for himself. Milton Ronald Petrie, the eldest, was born on the last day of 1933 in Bemidji, Minnesota, and was a small child when the family made its slow journey west in the house on the truck. Milton did not do well in school and had been held back, which left him older than his classmates and open to teasing. He made his home in the Spokane area, living for years in Chattaroy, where he died on 20 September 1994.
Vern Robert Petrie was born on 16 May 1936 in Bemidji, the middle son. He was still very young when the family moved west, riding through Conrad and a stint in Wallace before the family settled in Spokane, and he later graduated from Rogers High School. His fuller story — his marriage and the life he built out near Mt. Spokane — belongs to a chapter of its own.
Dale Richard Petrie, the youngest of the three brothers, was born on 4 December 1937 in Bemidji — a baby during the family's westward journey. He grew up in the Spokane area and attended West Valley. Dale had once dated Charlotte Anne Daubel, though she would go on to marry his brother Vern; in 1961 Dale married Patricia Gwendolyn Evans and made his home in Spokane.
With Gladys and Robert settled at last in Spokane and their three sons raised in the surrounding valleys, the Cooper and Petrie lines had traveled the full distance from the North Dakota prairie and the Minnesota timber to the hills of the Inland Northwest — the place where, for this branch of the family, the westward migration came to rest.