Moses Roper - Final Years

Final Years

Roper married Ann Stephen Price in Bristol, England on December 21, 1839. He had four daughters, one born on the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Canada c1844 and with two born in Quebec and the youngest born in Nova Scotia between 1850 and 1857. He thrice returned to the British Isles, first in 1846 to "settle private matters" (possibly to arrange a new edition of his Narrative); then in 1854 and sometime before 1861, to lecture. The final time, he brought his wife and daughters back, and the 1861 British Census finds them living with his father-in-law (William Price) in Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, Wales while Moses is in Cambridge, England, staying in a boarding house.

Sometime after 1861, Moses Roper returned to the United States, where he lived the life of an itinerant lecturer, travelling from place to place discoursing on various subjects, including "Africa and the African People", "Causes of the Colors of the Races," and on the "Holy Land." It appears that after his return to the States, his family never heard from him again; by 1871, his wife has remarried and when his youngest daughter Alice Mary Maud Roper married in 1883, Roper's name was listed with the comment "(deceased)."

It also appears that he met only middling success as a lecturer and that for several years before his death, Moses Roper wandered through New England working at whatever he could find; he was working as a field hand on the farm of James T. Skillings in Franklin County, Maine near the town of Strong when "his strength gave out" in April 1891. Roper, in very poor physical condition with a little more than a hundred dollars in his pocket and accompanied only by a dog named Pete (described as "his faithful companion") was placed on a train to Boston, Massachusetts.

Roper and his dog made it to Boston, but he was found unconscious in a railroad station and taken to the Boston City Hospital. When he was found, it was noted that he was "well protected from the cold, wearing four shirts, two overcoats and three pair of pantaloons." It was also found that he was suffering from "a complication of diseases of the heart and kidneys and also from eczema" which caused his death on April 15, 1891. His dog had to be dragged away from his bedside.