One of the sometimes good, often scary things about writing about history–especially local history–is the possibility that a reader will come up with more information than you have regarding what you are writing about! It can be especially traumatic if their information contradicts yours and if you have committed your version to print, in a book, say.
Fortunately for me I am working in blog format, meaning that information committed to “print” can be easily corrected or amended simply by an additional entry, which is what this one is all about. In my previous entry, The Germans are Coming, Part 7, I indicated that I basically had no information about one Daniel Rhoades, the attendee to the sale of Friedrich Richter’s estate who bought his Meerschaum pipe. As soon as he read this, my friend and colleague, Kelly McAllister, shot me off an email to report that Daniel “Tuck” Rhoades was a good friend of Kelly’s great grandfather, George McAllister (also an attendee of the sale), when they were young, and to prove it he provided a photograph of the pair with arms around each other and enjoying a good cigar!
This image, probably made as a tintype in 1879, the year before the estate sale, shows George on the left, Daniel on the right and holding some sort of indistinct document. Insofar as Daniel was the son of Daniel Mounts’ sister, Mary Ann (Mounts) Rhoades, and George, husband-to-be of Christina Mounts, was Mounts’ son-in-law, Kelly is a relative of both, though I don’t think the English language was the appropriate term for his status. Thanks, Kelly.
Though we don’t (yet!) know Daniel Rhoades date of birth, it is likely that he was about the same age as George McAllister, who was born in 1856. Daniel’s father was Francis (Frank) Marion Rhoades, an Ohioan who was Indian agent for the Chehalis River Reservation and served two terms (1878 and 79) in the territorial legislature. As stated, Daniel’s mother was Mary Ann (Mounts) Rhoades, one of Daniel Mounts sisters. She and Frank had a spread in Gate, Washington, for awhile before moving to Santa Cruz where they both passed away in the second decade of the 20th Century.
Daniel’s main claim to fame at this point, other than owning Richter’s pipe, was his association with and marriage to one Maggie Shields. As best I can make out from reports of the trial that appeared in the Seattle P.I. in 1897, Maggie, age 18, had barely given birth to a child just a month or two after marrying Bert Bartow, a young man from Tacoma, when she (or her father; the reports are conflicting) accused Bert’s father, Professor A.H. Bartow, principal of the Emerson School, of seducing her and fathering the child. The senior Bartow was eventually charged with adultery (seeing that he was a married man) and a lengthy trial ensued. Professor Bartow eventually was acquitted, following understandably passionate testimony in his favor by his son, but a divorce soon followed, and the baby was put up for adoption. Daniel Rhoades married Maggie two years later, when she was 21. They had one child together, William C. Rhoades, before she died at age 24, causes currently unknown.
More about Daniel will be reported, if and when it becomes known. Thanks again, Kelly!
As the complicated processing of Friedrich Richter’s estate moved forward, a new wrinkle appeared, the interests of his surviving family. You may remember that the executor, Daniel Mounts, stated early on that he knew of no existing family of the deceased. But in mid-July, 1880, a letter arrived at the Probate Court in Steilacoom from the German Immigration and Aid Society of Sedgwick County, Kansas, inquiring on behalf of Emil Richter, Friedrich’s brother.[i] According to the letter, Emil recently had been informed by one J. Anton Miller of Steilacoom (also formerly from Germany) of Friedrich’s passing, and “that his brother at the time of his death possessed several hundreds [sic] acres of land and considerable personal property.” Further, the letter stated that Friedrich was survived by his parents, in Germany, and seven brothers and sisters “living partly in Germany and partly in the United States.” The letter was written by Emil’s attorney, Julius Junkermaim, and it reported that a sister who resided in Wisconsin had already hired a lawyer to represent her. Junkermaim requested a statement of Friedrich’s property and liabilities, so that Emil “may be enabled, before proceeding further, to ascertain whether there are interests sufficient to justify him in making a journey to your territory for the purpose of attending to the settlement of his brother’s estate.”
The only evidence of an answer to the letter from Kansas in the estate papers is a cryptic note over attorney Hartman’s initials, indicating that a response was sent on May 3rd, 1881. That was just a few days before legal steps were taken to acknowledge Friedrich’s outstanding debts at the time of his death and the first steps in preparing for sale of his land. However, subsequent estate documents indicate that the Richter family’s bona fides as Friedrich’s beneficiaries had been established.
Before we move on to the sale of Richter’s land in the Nisqually Valley, however, we need to conclude the account of the auction of his personal property, a list of which was provided in the previous blog post (The Germans Are Coming, Part 6). Estate sales like Richter’s must have offered his neighbors a variety of benefits, in addition to the simple acquisition of material goods, though the opportunity to obtain some of the essential tools of farm existence in 19th century, rural Washington Territory, especially at used and/or bargain prices, must have been a strong draw. But, to judge from the journals of folks like the Mounts men—Daniel and his sons John and Tristan—and Edward Huggins, opportunities to socialize, exchange news, and conduct business in groups were few and far between, especially distant from urban centers, and highly valued. Such gatherings, when recorded, also would later provide an important resource to inquiring minds, such as mine, in search of information about patterns of settlement and commerce.
So it was that at least eleven men and one youth gathered at the Mounts home on the last day of July, 1880, to bid on Friedrich’s “considerable personal property,” which had been estimated likely to bring in a total of $135.75. Among them, one of those who came away with the most was his recent business partner, Joseph Klee.
Very little evidence of the nature of Richter’s and Klee’s relationship exists. Other than the obvious—a common Prussian birthright, participation in Salomon’s “army,” and the shared travels through California to Washington Territory—we know nothing about why the two men should purchase the Nisqually land together. Most likely it was an economic decision—the pooling of resources—and, to judge by entries in Huggins’ journal and other sources, they seemed to have differing relationships to the land. Richter rather aggressively farmed the land and built himself a small cabin there. Klee spent much of his time in mill towns and Tacoma as a laboring mechanic, and eventually sold off his portion of the Nisqually property, while Richter stayed put. When it came time to parcel out Friedrich’s personal possessions, the list of Klee’s purchases reflects his apparent lack of interest in the farming life, compared to other bidders at the auction, and a certain closeness to the personal side of Richter’s life.
Klee was high bidder on Friedrich’s feather bed and pillows ($4), two pairs of cotton drawers, a white shirt, and a vest (12¢), his gun, bullet pouch and two powder flasks ($2.38), his horse (a mare), saddle and bridle ($23.50), and his ice skates (50¢). His purchases of two scythes (with handles – 25¢), a harrow ($1.25), and a year-old heifer ($4.50) may have reflected his needs as an urban dweller (a lawnmower, a sod-buster, and a source of meat for the year). It was probably his work as a mechanic that prompted bidding on the pairs of compasses and calipers and a 4-inch square (38¢), but his purchase of Richter’s half share in a scow (probably the one Friedrich fell off of on the river) seems odd. Altogether Klee spent $41.88 on the possessions of his old comrade.
The only one to outspend Klee was the man who estate administrator Daniel Mounts had hired to assemble Richter’s possessions so that they could be appraised and eventually auctioned off, a task that may have given him an significant advantage in knowing the value of certain items beforehand. His name was James Cross, a partly Native American[i] in his late twentys or early thirties, a son of William Cross, about whom I have found no information yet. At the time of the auction a territorial census listed James as married to Lucy, an Indian and some 6-7 years his senior. James’s biggest scores at the auction of Richter’s possessions were some of his livestock—two cows and a calf ($30) and a yearling bull ($5.50)—and a boat with a sail ($7.50). The remainder of his purchases were a square and three augers ($1.25), a grain cradle ($3.50), and two stone jars and an oil can ($1.25). James total was $49.00.
According to the territorial census, by 1899 James and Lucy had three children, Henry (age 13), Silas (3), and Guy or George (1). By 1900, they were living on the Puyallup reservation, and Silas’ and George’s ages were given as 10 and 8, respectively. Lucy died in August, 1916, and was buried at the Firwood Indian Cemetery in Puyallup. Then in his mid 50s, James married Alice, whose lineage is unknown. He died of acute heart disease at age 78 in December 1930 and was also buried in the Firwood Cemetery.
Between the two of them, Klee and Cross accounted for almost 75% of the income from the sale of Richter’s possessions. The next “big spender,” dropping a relatively measly amount at the auction, was John Adams O’Neil. John was born in 1848 in Frederick County, Maryland, and so was thirty-two at the time of the auction. I was able to confirm very little about John’s past. The fact that he was buried eventually in the Washington Soldiers Home Cemetery in Orting (Pierce County), gives some credence to the possibility that he was the John A. O’Neil that, at age 16, enlisted in the Union Army in Ohio in October, 1864, only to be captured by the Rebs in December and imprisoned in Tennessee. He was returned to the Union side in a prisoner exchange and mustered out of the Army the following May. I am confident that our John eventually married a woman named Drusy, also from Kentucky (Harlan County) and some ten years younger. Purportedly, John worked as an engineer on early Puget Sound steamboats. John and Drusy were together until John’s death in his mid-70s in August, 1924. Drusy lasted another ten years, and was survived by at least three daughters. She was buried in Evergreen-Washelli Memorial Park in Seattle. The announcement of her death in the January 7, 1935 issue of the Seattle Daily Times included a reference to John’s role as a pioneer Puget Sound steamboat engineer.
O’Neil’s purchases at the auction were meager: A butcher knife (38¢), a brush hook and mattock ($1.00), a crosscut saw ($1.00), and a cow and calf ($10.50). Altogether he spent $12.88.
Next in line in the big spender column was William Stillman. An 1879 census has him as a farmer, single, living in Steilacoom, having been born about 1837 in Rhode Island to parents from New York and North Carolina. He bought Richter’s knives and forks (2/3rds of a dozen, $1.50), cups and saucers (five, for 50¢) plates and dishes (five, for 50¢), his belt (12.5¢), and two dozen chickens ($4.50). Sounds like he may have been setting up house. In any case, the $12.23 he spent was only slightly more than the amount he charged the estate for caretaking Richter’s possessions after his death and until the auction.
Some people seem to have come to the auction of Friedrich’s possession with specific needs in mind—tools, livestock, and perhaps household goods, for example—likely for their own farms and homes. Others may have come simply for the social time and out of respect for their friend and neighbor, and their purchases seem more whimsical to some extent. George Gilmore McAllister, for instance, was the one who got the bugle ($1.75) that Richter held in the photograph that I was given by Bud McBride (see The Germans are Coming, Part 3). He also picked up a blanket ($1.00), eleven spoons (50¢) and a small box of tools ($2.25), but I bet he was most pleased to get the bugle.
Freidrich Richter holding the bugle purchased by George McAllister
We’ll spend some time with George, for of all the people involved with Richter’s life, only the Mounts and the McAllisters still had relatives in the Nisqually Valley when I began hanging out there. The McAllisters and McBrides, relatives by marriage, deserve a blog chapter all their own, but for the moment we’ll keep their early history brief. George was Bud McBride’s maternal grandfather, for one, Kelly McAllister’s great grandfather for another. I am seriously indebted to Kelly, a local author and historian in his own right specializing in things Mounts, McAllisters, and McBrides, for much of the detail that follows.[ii]
George was born to John Wesley and Mary Jane McAllister at their farm on Chambers Prairie[iii] in July, 1856, one of their nine children. From Kentucky and Virginia, respectively, John and Mary Jane crossed the plains in 1852 and, via Oregon, eventually took a donation land claim on 320 acres bordering the river in the Nisqually Valley, adjacent to the land of James McAllister, John’s cousin. George began raising livestock at an early age, and at nine years old he helped two older brothers shepherd a flock of sheep belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company, for which they were paid $30 a month.
George went out on his own at age sixteen in 1872, initially as a raiser of sheep, and, according to Kelly, would spend “much of his life raising livestock, helping others with their hay crops, and a myriad of other activities associated with farming.” Five years later, George and an older brother, John, were charged with Grand Larceny, accused of stealing 79 sheep from W.H. Stevenson, a Canadian immigrant living out in the Muck area. They were eventually acquitted, probably helped by the testimony of one Frank Goodwin, purportedly the villain that had swindled George’s parents over a failed agreement to buy a farm on Muck Creek, resulting in the loss of their Nisqually property as well. Despondent, John and Mary Jane subsequently moved to a claim near Olympia and, suffering from poor health, John declined and died in 1874. Mary Jane married pioneer Philander Washburn a year later.
In 1880, the year of the auction of Richter’s effects, George was a 23-year-old bachelor, though a letter found by Kelly indicates that he was already courting Christina, at eighteen the oldest child of Daniel and Catherine Mounts. They would marry a year later, in July, 1881, and have four children: Ruby, James, Grover (Kelly’s grandfather), and Pauline (Delbert and Albert “Bud” McBride’s mother).
A young George McAllister, courtesy of Kelly McAllister
Eventually George bought a 160 acre homestead near the Nisqually River and about two miles south of the Mounts farm, Christina’s family home. George was a successful farmer, but also a “natural musician,” according to Kelly. His skill on violin and banjo made him (and some of his friends, like Frank Mounts and Wint Bennett) in demand at local country dances in the Valley and as far off as Roy. He was an artist, too, frequently drawing pictures and carving small animals from scrap wood.
George’s correspondence with young Christina, sent from a sheep farm in Oregon, before their marriage, indicated a dissatisfaction with the life of a sheep herder that, and with the unhappy life of his father as a model, couldn’t have left him feeling very comfortable with being a small farmer in the territory in the 1880s. Most likely he looked up to his successful and wealthy father-in-law, Daniel Mounts, as well, and so it was with alacrity that he jumped at the business opportunity Mounts offered him, a chance to buy into what was to be called “Nisqually City.”
It all began with the advent of the railroad in the Valley. The iron horse had first arrived in the area in 1873, when a line of the Northern Pacific was extended through Tenino and Yelm from Kalama on the Columbia River to Tacoma, recently designated as the Northern Pacific Railway’s western terminus. This branch missed the Valley proper, but then in 1890, a direct line was built between Olympia and Tacoma by the NPR’s Tacoma, Olympia and Grays Harbor Railroad. This line passed through Sherlock Station at the head of the valley, taking chunks out of the Mounts Farm and its neighbor, the Bennett Farm. Not to be outdone, representatives of the Union Pacific Railroad, which had been battling the NPR for control of Tacoma and environs, proposed running a line south from Lake City to a site on the Nisqually Plain, north of Daniel Mounts’ farm. There, on land put up by Mounts, the UPR men (most likely including entrepreneur and developer Frank Ross from Tacoma) proposed to establish “Nisqually City,” alternately referred to as “The Central City of the Inland Sea” and “The Pennsylvania of the West,” a reference to the site’s mineral resources.[i]
George and Christina were among those friends and relatives of Daniel Mounts who bought up lots on the Nisqually City plat and, in George’s case, built a home and a general store there in hopes of imitating the success of his older brothers in the grocery business. Then, suddenly, it was 1893, the bottom fell out of the economy, and development projects, including Nisqually City, shuddered to a halt. Basically, George and Christina and all the others who had bought lots lost everything. According to their great grandson, Kelly, Nisqually City was no more, and, in 1918, when Pierce County began its condemnation of land for Camp Lewis, the county acquired over a thousand lots in the “City,” many of which were owned by Dan Mounts’ heirs, for as little as $1.24 per lot.
George would again seek something beyond the drudgery of farm life when in 1905 he went to work for the Northern Pacific at the logging town of Gate in southern Thurston County for a couple of years. Meanwhile the McAllister ranch was being rented out, and the family had moved closer to “town” (Tacoma). Eventually, at age 60, George died suddenly of an infection, ultimately diagnosed as a form of meningitis. Christina lived another thirty years, never remarried and, as her eyesight failed, depended on her daughter, Pauline, for assistance. George and Christina’s legacy survives through their children, Grover McAllister and Pauline McAllister McBride; daughter Ruby had no children, and son, Jimmy, died young.
It is no surprise that EdwardHuggins was on hand for the sale of Richter’s effects. After all, his participation in their appraisal had given him the chance to spy out choice pieces, and perhaps he attended just to be sure that all went well. At 48, with a working farm not far away, he also may have been in need of some tools. These he found in the form of a bucksaw for cutting firewood ($1), a hammer and chisel ($1), and twine and a 2-foot rule (25¢), for good measure. He also bought a couple of blankets ($1.75), perhaps for his wife, Letitia. Total, $4.00.
I’ve already acquainted you with Mr. Huggins and his involvement in Richter’s life and death in Blog Posts #4 and #6, so I will refer you to those pages. Here I will simply add that Huggins was just finishing up his first term as a Pierce County commissioner about this time; he would go onto a second term as commissioner and then was elected county auditor. Huggins would go on to become a member of the board of the Washington State Historical Society and was vice president of the National Bank of Commerce of Tacoma. He died in January, 1907, at age 75; Letitia was 79 when she died in September, 1910.
Still a bachelor like George McAllister, young John Northover, age 22, probably came to the auction with George and members of the Mounts family, for the evidence shows that the Mounts, McAllisters and Northovers were close, both in terms of land holdings and socio-culturally. In all three families, intermarriage and mingling of native and white cultures were the norm: Catherine Mounts (Daniel’s wife) and Christina her daughter (George McAllister’s wife) were biracial and in their daily lives brought together white and native traditions and peoples. John Northover, himself, was the offspring of a white father and a biracial mother and so probably experienced a similar mixture of cultures in his upbringing.
The Mounts clan, with a sprinkling of McAllisters (George is third from the left, in back), Northovers (John and William [Billy] and their wives are on the far right,) and others.
John’s story is a good example of how difficult it can be to trace someone’s parentage through the various sources of genealogical data, especially when Native Americans, whose primary sources of information have been oral, not written, are involved. The Anglicization and/or phonetic spelling of non-English names can add to the confusion.
John’s parents were William Northover, born in England about 1830, and Catherine (Kitty/Katy) Staliup (Sasqualt Stalib). One source has Catherine born in Snohomish County in 1831, another that she was a Nisqually woman, “daughter of sakatallo.” A third, the report of a direct descendant, says that Kitty was the child of an Irishman named Corcoran and a Cowlitz woman. However, the fact that her child, John, would eventually marry the daughter of a Corcoran suggests the possibility that this source may have had the generations confused.
William and Kitty were together as early as 1854, and they had five children, June, Emma, John, Joseph and William. William Sr. achieved a certain notoriety for his association, a fatal one, with a member of the Vigilante Committee, a group of men that for a while took justice into their own hands in Pierce County, in the 1870s.[ii] According to the Daily Pacific Tribune (Feb. 8, 1870), William likely quarreled with one of the vigilantes, Charles Calder, over the group’s recent killing of men named Gibson and McDaniel. Later, according to the newspaper’s next-day post, Calder left Steilacoom, arrived drunk at Northover’s, and began insulting one of his daughters (June or Emma), “a half-breed, and nearly a woman grown.” When William “remonstrated with him for his brutal conduct,” Calder shot him in the stomach and then went after the daughter, “intent upon adding the outrage of her person to the crime already committed upon her father.” She escaped, William died, no doubt a very painful death, and Calder went to the Penitentiary for seven years. Ten days after William Northover’s death, William Benston petitioned the Probate Court to appoint a guardian for John and his siblings; his brother, Adam Benston, was appointed. These Benstons were descended from Scotsmen from the Orkney Islands who, like William Northover, had served the Hudson’s Bay Company for some years; they were also the sons of a Native woman. We’ll come back to the Benstons, soon.
By 1880, the year of the auction of Richter’s possessions, John Northover assuredly had been on his own for some time. His purchases at the sale, $3.50 in all, suggested a lack of a significant amount of “the ready,” but also perhaps the lack of focus and domestic orientation characteristic of some young adult males: a silk handkerchief (38¢), a linen handkerchief (12½ ¢), a box or trunk, contents unknown ($2.12½), and a manure fork (88¢). You can always use a manure fork.
Eight years later, in September, John married nineteen year-old Elizabeth Ellen Corcoran. In doing so he allied himself to one of the oldest mixed families in the region, descended from one of the earliest Hudson’s Bay Company employees, Jean-Baptiste Chalifoux (alternate spellings in the literature include Chaulifoux, Chaullifoux, Chalifou, Chalifour, Sherlifou, Sherlafoo, and Jellifaux). A French Canadian, Chalifoux was born in Beauport, Quebec, October 16, 1801, into a family that traced its direct ancestry to some of the first colonists to New France in 1634.[iii] Jean-Baptiste appeared in the Pacific Northwest about 1840, working first at HBC sites at Fort Vancouver and on the Stikine River in Russian Alaska and then, from 1848-1858, as a carpenter and blacksmith for the Puget Sound Agricultural Company at Cowlitz Prairie and Nisqually. Soon after his arrival in the PNW, Chalifoux married Iuse Musch Skaowit, AKA Harriet, AKA Annie Whim, a very young daughter of Scanewa of the Cowlitz who, according to tribal history, was ruler over 17 sub-chiefs and their tribes.[iv] Purported to have seven wives among the tribes of western Washington, Scanewa spent a good deal of time with the HBC and its employees, and, according to Cowlitz genealogist Michael Hubbs, many current Cowlitz members can trace their lineage back to three of Scanewa’s daughters that married HBC men: Simon Plamondon, John McLeod (McCloud), and Jean Baptiste Chalifoux. The same can be said for the Puyallup and the Nisqually, at least in McLeod/McCloud’s case.
Iuse Musch Skaowit survived only another seven years before succumbing to smallpox or measles at Fort Nisqually, leaving Jean-Baptiste with two daughters, Josephine, born in March, 1842, and Elizabeth, born in January, 1844. According to family lore, Jean-Baptiste eventually married a woman named Sophie who apparently was cruel to her stepdaughters. As a result, Jane Work Tolmie, wife of Factor Dr. Tolmie at Nisqually, took the girls under her wing and had Jean Baptiste send them to Victoria to be educated. At sixteen, Josephine married Domonic Corcoran in the home of Mrs. Francis Gravell, a little south of Roy. (Jean-Baptiste died in 1867.)
Corcoran was an Irishman from Sligo County, Yeats’ home. At the time of his marriage to Josephine he was 34 years of age and, after working in Glasgow, Scotland, Montreal, and Wisconsin, was a veteran of the California gold fields, where he earned enough to be able to bring his family—his parents, three brothers, and a sister—over from Ireland. Domonic and Josephine had nine children, including Elizabeth, who would marry John Northover. So, we have the granddaughter (Elizabeth) of one HBC employee (Jean-Paul Baptiste) marrying the son (John Northover) of another (William Northover).
John and Elizabeth developed a “choice farm” on “160 acres of raw land,” southeast of the current location of Spanaway, according to family lore, and eventually had six children. John died in 1927 at age 67, Elizabeth in 1949 at age 80.
Like Edward Huggins, his fellow appraiser of Richter’s personal possessions, James E. Orr probably had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to get before the sale commenced. You’ll remember from the previous post of this blog that about this time James, his wife Nancy, and Nancy’s granddaughter, Olive, were living near the Huggins’ farm, east of the Nisqually River, and to judge from his purchases, he had, or was contemplating having, some land in need of attention. He bought the metal components of a plow (a clamp and coulter, or plow blade, and a plow wheel) and a hoe, all for $1.75. Having appraised the items for $2. 67½, he must have been pleased with the deal he got. (I would love to know how things got figured down to the half cent!)
At 53, Omar H. White was among the older attendees to the auction, and one who left very little in the way of a historical footprint. He was born in the East about 1827 to his father, David, who was rumored to be of “foreign birth,” or from New York, and mother Winifred “Winna” Garlick, whose family was present in the Virginia Colony as early as 1750. By 1850 Omar and a woman presumed by the census to be his wife, “Matissa,” age 20, were living with his parents and siblings in Rome on the edge of the Ohio River. By 1853 Omar and Matilda Ball White had emigrated to Washington Territory and Steilacoom, where they began having children—eventually three boys. A farmer, Omar and Matilda seem to have remained in the Steilacoom area for the rest of their lives, and both are buried in the Masonic Cemetery there. Omar died in 1899.
Omar H. White
Omar was well enough known to deserve a photograph in Bonney’s History of Pierce County, but not his biography. His civic-mindedness did receive a mention in Town on the Sound: Stories of Steilacoom, however. In 1853, when the town’s founding fathers, led by Lafayette Balch, intercepted Reverend John DeVore on his way from the East to accept a position in Olympia and convinced him to stay in Steilacoom instead, Omar was among those who built the first Protestant (Methodist Episcopal) church north of the Columbia. Then, sometime after the first community library was established five years later by an act of the Territorial legislature, some men were seen trying to make off with its books. In response, “ A ‘committee’ composed of [E.R.] Rogers, W.R. Downey, Nathaniel Orr, and O.H. White, each toting a rifle, proceeded to the wharf where they rescued the books and took them to McCaw-Rogers store.”
At the auction, White spent $1.50 on Richter’s linen coat and hat (25¢), a hay fork (75¢), and a draw knife and hatchet (50¢).
Forty-nine year old William Young seemed to have been a practical man. He spent $1.25 at the auction, acquiring a coffee pot and four plates (25¢), a pick axe and a maul (50¢), and two towels (50¢). Young was a veteran of the Hudson’s Bay Company too, and one of those that had married a local woman, Ya So Leet Sa of the Snohomish, also known as Jane Snohomish and Jane Shelton.
Like the Benstons, who helped care for William Northover’s children after their father’s death, William Young, who was baptized William Young Gullion in February, 1830, was a Scotsman from the Orkneys, and he served at Fort Nisqually from 1850-1859. Ya So Leet Sa gave birth to a daughter, Janet, in March, 1856, during the Puget Sound Indian War, and then sometime later returned to her birth family, leaving Janet with William. The dynamics between the HBC men and their native wives and families were complex, reflecting the former’s desire to acculturate and assimilate the women, and their desire to seek acceptance by their husbands’ social milieu. So it is really no surprise that William, as historian Emma Milliken puts it, “was bringing [Janet] up as a true Scottish lass.”[i] In addition to the basics of cooking, washing the clothes and keeping their cabin clean, he taught her how to read and write, make patchwork quilts, dance the Highland Fling, can fruit, make jams and jellies, pickles, and pies, how to dye yarn (from berry juices), and knit and weave. Apparently also a good Christian, William taught Janet the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and his favorite Scripture passages.
Janet Young, courtesy of Fort Nisqually Living History Museum
It is tempting, before proceeding with the lives of William and Janet Young, to wander further afield into the lives of the Benstons and the Guillions. Both families emigrated from the island of Eday, one of the Orkneys in Scotland, and alliances between them seem to go way back. Understanding that relationship, though, is complicated by the fact that the Benstons favored use of the names Adam and William, and the Guillions Janet and Sarah. Three generations of Adam Benstons show up in Pierce County in the 1850s-80s, for instance. To further complicate matters the available genealogical data, based on cemetery headstones and census and death reports, are conflicting and confusing. For example, one headstone indicates that the Janet Guillion, who married the Adam Benston born in 1823, gave birth to sons William and Adam when 10 and 11, respectively, a fact that is contradicted, if only slightly, by reports of the ages of the children found elsewhere. However, all complications aside, the most important point to emerge from all this confusion is that representatives of both families, as HBC employees, married local, Native Americans early on and, through the generations, repeatedly.
By the time of the Richter estate sale, William Young had established himself as a successful farmer and his daughter, Janet, now age twenty-one, was already three years married to William Benston, whose brother, Adam, had been the one to become guardian of William Northover’s children years before. Confusingly, Adam married Janet Guillion, William Young’s sister, in 1877. That Janet had remained in Scotland until their parents died in 1875 (in the poor house, of all things), before joining William in Washington Territory. So, Janet Young was niece and sister-in-law of Janet Benston, Adam Benston was William Young’s brother-in-law, etc. etc. See what I mean?
Sometime after the death of her husband, William Benston, in 1899, Janet Young Benston filed an application for an allotment of land under the Dawes, or General Allotment Act. In her application, Janet states that William Benston was “a half-blood—also of Snohomish Indian blood.” According to the application, Janet Young Benston and her husband had five children between 1877-1896. William died in 1899, and Janet’s father, William Young, died three years later, at age 71. Adam Benston, Janet’s brother-in-law, was appointed administrator of Young’s estate, which consisted primarily of 150 acres of land (located near the Nisqually Reservation, and now about half a mile south of the Mounts Road interchange on I-5). At some point 40 year-old Joseph Young objected to Adam Benston’s appointment. Purporting to be William Young’s son by his second marriage, during which the land had been acquired he said, he, Joseph, was the rightful heir, and he wanted Tighe Mounts (Daniel and Catherine Mounts fifth child and third son) made administrator. While there is no record of any legal filing of his objection, there is one saying that the Court was happy to accept Joseph’s withdrawal of it. Among other things, Young had no second marriage. Incidentally, the land was appraised by J.H. Benston, Frank Mounts (Tighe’s older brother) and Frank Carlson (Janet Benston’s son-in-law). In 1902 it was still a very small world….
In 1909 Janet married again, to a John H. Miller of Illinois. She had already moved to Seattle, and in 1918 she moved to California with her husband before returning to Washington State in 1922. She died in 1936. Of her five children, two died young. The two oldest married white people.
The most unique, and to my mind the most valuable of Richter’s possessions, his Meerschaum pipe, went to D. Rhodes, for $1.13, the only thing he took away that day. About Mr. Rhodes, other than a likely penchant for tobacco, I have been able to discover nothing.
Which leaves us with the 25¢ spent by “Master Mounts.” Probably one of Daniel Mounts two oldest sons, John (born June 19, 1868, and so 12) or Frank (born March 6, 1870, and so 10), Master Mounts had an eye out for his future, and so purchased Richter’s straight razor.
The total raised for the sale was $130.87 (though I haven’t checked Daniel Mounts’ math). Next to come would be the sale of Richter’s real estate in the Nisqually Valley.
Coming next in The Germans are Coming, Part 8. Richter’s land holdings are sold off to one old player and one new, who turns out to be the last German to own the property before the Norwegians take over and the Braget story begins. Divorce, and a piano, figure in.
[i] Milliken, Emma. “Choosing between Corsets and Freedom: Native, Mixed-Blood, and White Wives of Laborers at Fort Nisqually, 1833-1860” in Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 2005, 96(2):95-101.
[i] See For the Good of the Order: The Braget Farm and Land Use in the Nisqually Valley, pp. 30 and 44 for more information on the coming of the railroad to the Nisqually Valley and Nisqually City.
[i] A Pierce County census for 1889 listed James as half Indian; a 1930 Puyallup census lists him as one quarter blood.
[ii] Additional sources of information about the McAllisters include William P. Bonney’s History of Pierce County, Vol. 3, which contains George’s biography, notes and documents assembled by Delbert McBride, and newspaper articles.
[iii] At the time, Chambers Prairie took up much of the area between Olympia, to the west, and Long and Pattison Lakes, to the east. Eventually a good part of it became urbanized, first as Woodland and then as the City of Lacey. Formerly a portion of the land controlled by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, the area was settled by the family of Thomas Chambers, an Irishman who arrived in Steilacoom in 1847. Chambers filled a variety of political roles in the County, including that of Probate Judge. He died at the age of 101 in 1876.
In previous chapters of this blog, The Germans are Coming, Parts 1 to 5, I acquainted you with details of the lives of Friedrich Richter and Joseph Klee, the two young men that claimed about 100 acres of land on the Nisqually “Bottom” marshland and higher, forested property that sits on the edge of the Nisqually delta at the south end of Puget Sound. This land would eventually become the centerpiece of the dairy farm belonging to the Braget family that I wrote about in For the Good of the Order: The Braget Farm and Land Use in the Nisqually Valley (Gorham Printing, 2021).
When we last left him, in 1880, Mr. Richter’s life had come to an abrupt end. He drowned in the Nisqually River while boating across it. Mr. Klee eventually sold off his portion of their Nisqually land and moved on to Tacoma, where for 47 more years he lived the life of a moderately successful mechanic and businessman, married twice, and experienced his own tragedies with the death of loved ones.
In one sense, Richter’s story was done; while it took almost two months for searchers to find his body (most likely, in June, when he went overboard, the river was still “up,” making it difficult to locate floating and possibly sinking objects). But soon after they did, he was buried not far from his cabin on the edge of the slough. There his bones rested until disturbed by a road-building Braget, some 70 years later.
However, there actually is quite a bit more to the Richter story, an interesting and complex last chapter, due to the fact that Richter’s estate, such as it was, had to be probated. He left no will, but he did have considerable land and probably what was the average list of possessions of an immigrant bachelor on the “frontier” in the second half of the 19th century. The story of their accounting and dispersion is one worth the telling.
Mounts Petitions the Court
Three weeks after Richter disappeared in the river, his neighbor, Daniel Morgan Mounts, filed a petition in the Probate Court of Pierce County, Washington Territory, to the effect that Friedrich had “died intestate, leaving property real and personal, in said county.” Moreover, it was Mounts’ belief that Richter had no relatives in the territory, but that they “reside somewhere on the Continent of Europe.” And finally, as a “resident householder and freeholder within said County of Pierce,” and a standup guy, he, Mounts, should be appointed (and paid to be) administrator of the estate.
With approval of this petition, Mounts undertook a legal process that would consume the better part of six years, produce 163 pages of legal documents (all handwritten in varying degrees of legibility) and involve at least thirty people, all men, in a variety of roles in the processing. While the steps in the legal procedure might prove fascinating to some of the more obsessive types among my readers, it is the stories of the people involved that I wish to tell. The participants represent a cross-section of the men on hand in the county at this time, late in the 19th century: in addition to Richter and Klee, at least seven were recent German immigrants, six were first or second generation English or Scottish, one was Canadian by birth, one was French, and two were full or part Indian. The rest had moved west from Illinois, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland or New York. The group ranged in age from 18 to 75 and in employ from grave digger to farmer, to scribe, lawyer, and judge. Let’s meet them in the order that they became involved with Mounts’ handling of the estate.
Daniel Morgan Mounts
First on the list, of course, was Dan Mounts himself. I wrote of him at length in For the Good of the Order, of his marriage to Catherine, daughter of Hudson’s Bay Company’s employee John McLeod and Clay-qua-dote, a Nisqually Indian, and of their ten children, who would divide up the Mounts estate themselves eventually (interestingly, Mounts also left no will, and so died intestate). A transplant from Illinois, eighteen-year-old Daniel arrived in the West in 1850, stopping first in Oregon and perhaps California, before taking a land claim in the South Bay region on the west side of Henderson Inlet, in Thurston County, in 1853. His extended family, including his parents, Thomas Jefferson Mounts and Mary Ann (Barbee) Mounts, followed and took an adjacent claim. With the coming of the Indian War in 1855, Daniel spent a three month’s enlistment in Company B, 1st Regiment of the Puget Sound Mounted Volunteers (Capt. Gilmore Hays) along with 88 of “most of the able-bodied farmers of the surrounding countryside,” while many of their families took refuge in Olympia.[1] After the war, Mounts left his claim on the clay and gravelly loam of the South Bay area to take positions as agricultural instructor and acting agent of the new, 4,000 acre plus Nisqually Reservation, which straddled the banks of the Nisqually River. There he met and married Catherine, in 1860; six years later they purchased a land claim from Joel Myers (who we will soon meet) in the fertile soils of Nisqually. Now, at age 48 in 1880, Mounts was well on his way to amassing the more than 1000 acres that would make up the largest farm in the valley, and Catherine had already given birth to seven youngsters. Land-conscious and also civic-minded, Dan Mounts seemed the obvious one to take on the administration of Richter’s estate and, by the bye, take possession of the papers and photographs the young German left behind that would make their way to me, thanks to Mounts’ great-grandsons, Del and Bud McBride.
Thomas Jefferson Mounts and Mary Ann (Barbee) Mounts
Daniel Mounts’ request to become administrator of Richter’s estate was directed to and approved by one Charles Henry Botsford, judge of the Probate Court of Pierce County, which, in mid-1880, was still located in Steilacoom (it would move to Tacoma later in the year). “C.H.” to the public, Charles was the only Canadian by birth in our story, having been born in 1805 into a family of judges living in Westcock, a tiny town in southeastern New Brunswick. (Almost 100 years later, according to Wikipedia, “Westcock had 1 post office, 1 sawmill, 1 grist mill, 1 church and a population of 150.”) Charles was the son of William Botsford (1773-1864), a native of Connecticut who attended Yale before beginning a long career in the law and politics in Saint John, on the Bay of Fundy, that ended with his appointment to the Supreme Court of New Brunswick. C.H.’s older brother, Amos Edwin Botsford, also had an illustrious career in the province’s military, judicial system, and government, and was a founder of the New Brunswick and Prince Edward Railway Company.
At 75 the oldest player in the Richter story, C.H. Botsford would resign from his job as Probate Judge before the end of 1880, and die three years later. His wife, Amelia Jarvis Botsford (1817-72), predeceased him, and both are buried at the Fort Steilacoom Cemetery in Lakewood.
More enigmatic than Botsford was C.W. Hartman, who submitted Mounts’s request to the court. Mounts’s lawyer and creator of many of the documents that made up the estate’s brief, Hartman was born about 1842 in Ohio, according to census forms, and so was 38 years of age at the time of the probate filing. His parents appear to have come to the Buckeye State from New York and Iowa, where he married his wife, Martha. Hartman and his family were living in Steilacoom in 1879, but it seems that they were relatively recent arrivals. The censuses record that their first three children, Mary, Grace, and Horace, were born in California between the years 1871 and 1875. Most likely gold fever brought the Hartmans west.
The family appears to have moved from Steilacoom to Olympia in 1889, but then the record on these Hartmans dissolves. Of note is that another but apparently unrelated family of Hartmans, headed by a David Hartman (1851-1935; also from Ohio and Iowa) and his wife Mary Jane, second daughter of James McAllister, was prominent in the story of Nisqually. So far, I have discovered no links between C.W. and David.
Written by Hartman, Daniel Mounts’ petition to the probate court to become administrator of Richter’s estate was approved by Judge Botsford, with the condition that he post a $200 bond, “with two or more sufficient sureties…. for the faithful discharge of the duties of his trust, according to law.” Those that Mounts chose to guarantee his faithful discharge were N.H. Orr and Martin Gimel, residents of the town of Steilacoom.
For a bit of context, it is important to know that for about 30 years after the arrival of Michael T. Simmons and his party at the falls on the Deschutes River and the founding of the first American settlement in Oregon Territory north of the Columbia in 1845, the economy, politics, and society of the pioneers in the South Sound, such as they were, centered on a 25-30 mile region along the Southern Puget Sound coast encompassing Olympia and Steilacoom. Steilacoom was the first to be incorporated, in 1854, and also was the seat of Pierce County until 1880. Olympia became the county seat of brand new Thurston County in 1852, and was incorporated in 1859. By 1860, the combined population of the two tiny towns was still less than 1,500—a pretty tiny pond awaiting lots of big fish. The power center of the region did not really begin to shift to the north for another decade. Seattle was not permanently incorporated until 1869, Tacoma in 1875. The coups de grâce were administered by the Northern Pacific Railroad, for Tacoma, and the development of maritime enterprise, for Seattle. Tacoma’s population in 1880 was just under 1,100; by 1890 it was 36 times larger.
Destined to become Steilacoom’s favorite son, guarantor Nathaniel Hope Orr was born in the village of Washington in Washington County, Virginia in 1827.[2] He was the oldest son of Arthur and Jane Hope Orr, and great, great grandson of Arthur Orr “The Elder,” who emigrated from Ireland in the late 18th century. Nathaniel departed for the five-month trip on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1851 as a twenty-four year old. Already an accomplished carpenter, specializing in wagon making, Orr took advantage of an encounter in Oregon City with Henderson Luelling to become an orchardist as well. A horticulturalist from North Carolina (with Welsh roots), Luelling had come to Oregon four years earlier, after years in the nursery business in Indiana and Iowa. Luelling‘s sojourn west may have been influenced by his reading of Lewis and Clark’s journals, first published in 1814. However, the fact that he and his Quaker wife had been drummed out of the Salem (Iowa) Monthly Meeting of Friends for their abolitionist views and participation in the Underground Railroad may have had something to do with it, as well.
The Luellings (Henderson, his wife Jane, and eight children) brought west with them a wagonful of fruit trees and established a nursery, first in Milwaukee, between Portland and Oregon City, and later in the California Bay area. From there they supplied the orchards of settlers brought west by the opening of Oregon Territory and the passage of the Donation Land Claim Act in 1850. Apparently first and foremost a Quaker, however, Luelling left California (and his wife) a few years after meeting Orr to attempt to establish a utopian community in Honduras. Unsuccessful, he returned to California, where he died in 1878.
Alfred Plummer. Courtesy the UW Library Collection
After a short and informal internship with Luelling, Nathaniel Orr continued on to Steilacoom, where he arrived on August 24, 1852, just one year after Captain Lafayette Balch and John Chapman took adjoining claims and laid out Port Steilacoom and Steilacoom City, respectively. (In 1854, the legislature of year-old Washington Territory joined the two claims into the town of Steilacoom, the first incorporated community in the territory. The name of the town originated in the presence of Native Americans inhabiting the Tacoma drainage basin.) Balch’s tireless promotion of the South Puget Sound region soon attracted a string of pioneers whose names and businesses dominate the region even to today: Thomas Chambers, A.J. Pope and Andrew Talbot (founders of Port Gamble), Alfred Plummer and Charles Bachelder (founders of Port Townsend), and the Meekers.
Orr quickly began building a wagon shop in Balch’s Port Steilacoom and eventually took a 160 acre claim on nearby Anderson Island at Oro Bay. But when hostilities broke out in 1855, he returned to town and enlisted in Company D of the 1st Regiment of Washington Territory Volunteers, under Capt. William Wallace. After the war, Orr completed his shop, with living quarters above, and began turning out the necessities of life. In addition to wagons, he built tables, chairs, beds, washing machines, quilting and rug-making frames and quilting wheels, and coffins.
Soon Orr was making other invaluable contributions to the town and its inhabitants. In partnership with entrepreneur Phillip Keach, he established a commercial fruit tree orchard in Chapman’s Steilacoom City, and in 1857 accepted a job as clerk to the new Steilacoom school district. The same year he made a bid for the Democratic ticket to become a representative to the territorial legislature, only to be beaten out by Ezra Meeker’s older brother, Oliver, who had a general store in Steilacoom with his brother and father. (Oliver eventually would drown while procuring supplies for the store from San Francisco when the steamship Northerner struck a rock off Cape Mendocino.) Finally, in 1858, Orr got himself elected to the Pierce County government.
Nathaniel and Emma Orr Courtesy of the Steilacoom Historic Association
Nathaniel Orr remained a confirmed bachelor until the age of 41, when he encountered Emma Thompson, from Victoria, B.C., a woman of twenty-one “with golden hair and creamy complexion,” at the water well behind his wagon shop. They married in May, 1868, and over the next twenty-two years produced eight children, only four of which survived into the 20th century. Orr died in 1896 and was buried in the Steilacoom Masonic Cemetery, the land for which Nathaniel and Emma had sold to the Lodge for the paltry sum of $50, years before.
A more elusive figure than Orr, the other guarantor, Frenchman Martin Gimel, was born about 1828. By 1880 be had been a keeper of a saloon at the corner of Main and Lafayette Streets in Steilacoom for at least four years, a position that apparently gave him a reputable enough standing in the community to provide “suritie” for Daniel Mounts. That may not always have been the case. Historian Herbert Hunt reported that the area, from Steilacoom to the very young town of Tacoma, was plagued by a series of murders in 1873. One, an attack by James Carey on John Lewis, occurred after “Carey and Lewis had been drinking in the saloons of John Brown and Martin Gimel, low resorts near John Rigney’s place on the railroad line.”[3] Hunt ascribed a rising crime rate to the recent arrival of the railroad from the south: “Along the right of way were saloons and other low places which seemed to have controlled rather than to have been controlled, and they were the scene of fighting and robbery all the way from the Columbia River [to Tacoma]….There were flocking to this part of the country adventurers of every variety and petty crimes grew alarming to the citizens.”[4]
A western bar scene
By the time our tale of Richter’s estate begins, Martin had married Margaret, ten years his junior; according to the 1880 U.S. Census, Margaret’s father was also French, while her mother was from British Columbia. Between them Martin and Margaret produced eight children. One, Mary, will show up again later in this tale. Another, also named Martin (1870-1900), died in a streetcar accident in Tacoma. Their youngest son, George (1883-1968), would become proprietor of the Union Saloon on the corner of Main and Commercial in Steilacoom. The elder Martin died in 1886 at age 61, only three years after George’s birth.
The Appraisal
Once Dan Mounts had been appointed administrator of Richter’s estate, the next step was to have it appraised. An application for appointment of appraisers was made to the Court, and on June 30, 1880, Judge Botsford ordered three individuals, Edward Huggins, James E. Orr, and Henry Walker, “three disinterested persons, competent and capable to act,” to provide the service. On July 8, Huggins, Orr, and Walker swore before Lawyer Hartman, in his capacity as a Notary Public, that each would “truly, honestly and impartially appraise the property of said estate which shall be exhibited to him, according to the best of his knowledge and ability.”
Edward Huggins , a young, impoverished Englishman without prospects who signed up with the Hudson’s Bay Company and ventured to the New World in 1849, may well have left the greatest legacy to the history of the early Pacific Northwest of any of the men involved in Richter’s story. His roles at Fort Nisqually in the second half of the nineteenth century put him right in the middle of the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the transition of control of its lands to American ownership. His extensive reporting of events, often decades after they occurred, in journals and in letters to Tacoma newspapers and to such notables as Clarence Bagley, himself a pioneer historian and author of detailed histories of Seattle and King County, have provided invaluable detail about pioneer life in the region.
Edward Huggins
However, the fact that Huggins’ reports were often much removed in time and place from the original events raises questions of their accuracy and even veracity. Writing for Occurrences: The Journal of Activities at Fort Nisqually Historic Site, for example, Dixie Lowman suggests that Huggins used the commercial documents and records assembled by the fort’s chief factor, Dr. William F. Tolmie, as the basis for his own writings, some 45 years after the events, and “interspersed with a few of his own interjections, omissions and memories. The result… was that in Huggins’s published version his role in the action was enhanced from what it actually was.”[5]
Nonetheless, Huggins was on hand for a mind-boggling array of important historic events, and had extensive relationships with those in the pioneer community. In addition to his time with Dr. Tolmie himself, Huggins married Letitia Work, a daughter of a high-ranking HBC official, John Work, and Josette Legacée, a Metis[6] whose mother was from the Spokane tribe. The Works were “members of the Pacific Coast fur trade elite” according to Lowman, and Mrs. Work was sister to Dr. Tolmie’s wife, Jane. Ultimately, with Dr. Tolmie’s transfer to Fort Victoria in 1859, Huggins was given charge of Fort Nisqually until its closure in 1870, at which point he retired from the HBC, became an American citizen, and filed a claim for the Fort’s land. As an American, he became active in county politics, as county commissioner and auditor. Eventually, when their farm, now some 1000 acres in extent, became too much for them, the Huggins sold their land to the DuPont Company, which wanted to build an explosives factory. And the rest is history…[7]
As a close neighbor, Huggins performed many roles in Richter’s story, from purchaser of his marsh grass, to recorder of his demise, to, with Daniel Mounts, overseer of his burial. Now, he was an appraiser.
The second gentleman so appointed, James E. Orr (1831-1898), was the younger brother of Nathaniel Hope Orr of Steilacoom. There is no clear evidence concerning the timing of his arrival in Washington Territory. A census shows that he was still living with his parents and other siblings in Virginia in 1850, and his presence in Polk County, Oregon is recorded in 1870. But he does not show up in the Washington Territorial Census until 1878, with an address in the Muck area and with wife, Nancy Bell Orr (1836-1902).[8] No children are mentioned, but then two years later, the year of Richter’s death, James and Nancy appear to be living in Pierce County close by the Edward Huggins family, and they have an eleven year old “daughter” named Olive.
This is where things get complicated. A quick search for Nancy (“Bell, “Belle”) reveals that James was her second husband; she married her first, John Shelden from Vermont, in Illinois in December, 1850. The Sheldens arrived in Oregon Territory with a two-year old daughter named Learny and took up a place, and Shelden the blacksmith trade, near Salem, in Polk County, about 1853.
Then in 1867, a man with the good Scottish name of John Martin Knifong married Learny, age sixteen. The record shows that Learny gave birth to Olive two years later, still in Polk County. But in 1870 things started to get a little dicey. Nancy Bell and John Sheldon went their separate ways after some 20 years of marriage, and Nancy married James E. Orr. The Federal Census for 1870 shows the infant Olive living with the Knifongs, but subsequent comments by descendants suggest that the child was living with Grandma Nancy and James that year as well. Somewhere along the line the Knifongs split (he would remarry, also in 1880, and have five more children before dying at the young age of 49), and after that it may be that Olive moved back and forth between the households of her mother, Learny, and grandmother, Nancy. The Territorial Census shows her living with Learny near Muck in 1878, but by 1880 she was recorded in the Federal Census as the daughter of James and Nancy at their home near the Huggins. She moved with the Orrs to Steilacoom in time to be recorded by census there in 1883, and then on to Tacoma by 1885.
Interestingly, in 1887, when he is 56 years of age, James E. Orr appears in a census at the home of older brother Nathaniel, Nathaniel’s wife and eight children, in Tacoma. Most likely James was just visiting when the census taker arrived, but there is no sign of Nancy, or Olive.
James succumbs in 1898, eighteen years after performing his service as appraiser for Richter’s estate. Two years later the census shows Learny (called Lucy now) at the Orr home in Lake City, perhaps taking care of her mother, and listed as “divorced.” Nancy passes away in 1902. Olive briefly resurfaces in the record as Mrs. Christopher Hussey, but is widowed by 1909. The Hussey’s daughter, Bessie, who had been born in 1886, passes away in 1932 from a cerebral hemorrhage. That’s all, folks!
Henry Walker was born in Ohio in 1829 and, according to an Olympia newspaper death notice, “was a ‘49er and came to this county not many years after the memorable rush to California.” The accuracy of that report, however, is brought into question by a census that places Walker, a married man, in Ohio in 1863. Two years later, though, he is single and in the Nisqually Valley in time to buy the former Packard claim from Warren and Hepsibah Gove who, only two years before, had bought it from Packard himself (the Goves would go on to buy nearby property on the river that would later become part of the Braget farm).
Warren Gove
By 1880, Walker is 51 and firmly planted in the region where, as reported by the newspaper at his death, he “amassed considerable wealth,” in part by running a ferry across the Nisqually River, the main route between Steilacoom and Olympia. It was just downriver from Walker’s Ferry that Richter entered the water one too many times.
Henry Walker’s claim to fame in the history books is that in 1884, at age 55, he married a Nisqually woman, Kitty. Kitty’s date of birth is not known, and her parentage is contested. Many have reported that she was daughter of Quiemuth, Leschi’s brother, who was murdered in Gov. Stevens office in 1856, during the Indian War. Other informants suggest that she was daughter of an older Nisqually of some renown named Lashmere, which is what she named her first child. Kitty (whose name at any point in time included some of the following: Kate Walker Tenas Puss “Kitty Etta” Kautz Quiemuth), at a young age, first married August Valentine Kautz.
A great deal of ink has been spilled about Kautz, and about Kautz and Kitty. Born in Baden-Baden, August immigrated to Ohio as a youth and there began an illustrious military career that spanned at least four wars (the Mexican-American War, the Rogue River [Indian] War, the Puget Sound Indian War, and the Civil War) and brought him to the rank of major general in the Union Army.[9] Kautz’s main assignment in the Northwest was to Ft. Steilacoom, and it was there that he met and married the teenage Tenas Puss, also known as Kitty, in the 1850s. They had two sons, Lashmere Nugen Kautz and August Kautz, but then Kautz left his family in the Territory to go east, drawn by the Civil War and advancement in the military.
August Kautz
Conventional wisdom puts it that Kautz abandoned Kitty and the boys. In his journals he referred to her as a squaw and used other racist and misogynistic terms that were common to men of that time and station, and eventually he remarried, first to Charlotte Tod, in 1865, and then to Fannie Markbreit (another German from Baden-Baden), in 1872. He never resumed familial relations with Kitty and the boys, but according to August’s biographer and distant relative, Lawrence Kautz, he provided for them and stayed in touch with the boys. Through Edward Huggins he arranged for them to be placed in foster care with families in the Valley and sent money for their expenses “for many years.”[10]
Kitty remarried as well, to William Diggins of Olympia (originally from Indiana), in 1875, but that marriage ended in divorce less than two years later. Diggins moved on to San Francisco and, eventually, Dakota Territory. Kitty married Henry Walker in 1884.
By the time of their marriage, Henry is a man of some means, a fact that made him a suitable appraiser for Richter’s estate. He has been farming the Packard claim for almost twenty years; after another five years he sells out to Samuel Y. Bennett (1836-1914) and family. (Samuel’s grandson, Rodger, was one of Kenny Braget’s best friends.) Kitty died in 1891 and was buried in the public cemetery in Yelm. Henry moved to Olympia after selling his farm, and then joined his wife in Yelm Cemetery in 1905.
The farm of S.Y. Bennett, ca. 1892
Hear Ye, Hear Ye!
While Huggins, Orr, and Walker were performing their sworn duty of appraising Richter’s holdings, one day’s service for which they were paid three dollars each, Mounts and Lawyer Hartman caused to be entered into the legal record a description of the land in question, fully laid out in the township and range language of the US Public Land Survey System (the N.E. ¼ of the S.W. ¼ , the N. ½ of the S.W. ¼ of the S.W. ¼ … of Section Thirty Three in Township nineteen North range one east…), containing altogether 233 acres. At the same time, Judge Botsford ordered the administrator of the estate, Daniel Mounts, to give notice to “all persons having claims against the… deceased,” that they had a year to submit their claims. This was to be accomplished by publication in Steilacoom’s Weekly Puget Sound Express of said notice for at least four weeks in a row.
Then on July 12, with a completed appraisal of Richter’s property in his pocket, Daniel Mounts filed a petition for an order to sell Richter’s land and personal items. Mounts reported that funeral expenses and accounting costs had already amounted to $57, an amount that he anticipated would rise to $140 before all was said and done. Richter had had $59 in cash at the time of his death, and the appraisal of his personal property had come in at $135.75. Therefore, reported Mounts, everything would need to be sold to cover the costs of administration expenses, including a funeral, and taxes.
Judge Botsford approved the petition on the same day, stipulating that the sale of Richter’s personal property by conducted “at the Court House door or at the late residence of said deceased, or at some other public place,” and that notice of the sale, its location, date and time, be published in at least 10 public places in Pierce County for at least two weeks previously. The list of items to be sold, and their appraised value as set by Huggins, Orr, and Walker, follows:
1 Maul & set of Rings .50; 1 Pick & handle $1.00 1 50
1 Brush Hook .50; 1 Buck Saw $1.00 1 50
1 Iron Square 25¢; 3 Augers .50 75
2 Chisels .25; 1 Cross Cut Saw $1.00 1 25
2 Stone Jars $1.00; 1 oil Can 122 1 122
Saddle & Bridle 2 50
1 pr Skates 50
1 Hammer (Anvil) 1 00 21.25
1 Iron toothed Harrow 2.50
3 Cows 2 ea. $15.00 & 1 at $10.00 40.00
2 Yearlings 1 @ $8.00 1 $4.00 12.00
2 Calves each $4.00 8.00
1 Mare 20.00
1 Boat & Sail 6.00
Poultry [2 dozen chickens] 6.00
½ Interest in Scow 5.00
[Signed:] Edward Huggins, James E. Orr, Henry Walker, July 10, 1880.
Richter’s land holdings would be sold by a separate auction [see The Germans Are Coming, Part 6 continued]; his personal property, adjusted for $6.80 owed him by the Steilacoom baker, Frederick Eisenbeis, and $22.50 owed him for “30 bush. Potatoes, Oats 12 bush; Barley 7 bush; Wheat 1 bush” by James Cross, was valued at $204.35 in the appraisal. Altogether, before auction, Richter was worth $616.05 when all was said and done.
Just a quick introduction to Richter’s debtors, Mr. Eisenbeis and James Cross, before signing off this episode of The Germans are Coming! Another Prussian, Frederick E. Eisenbeis was born in 1825 and spent his first 18 years in his father’s flour mill. Frederick and his younger brother, Charles, emigrated to New York in 1853, and soon after they were on their way to California and the gold fields. Accounts differ, but Hines, who wrote about Frederick when he was still alive, has him staying in California only a year before moving on to Victoria and then to the Fraser River mines. Both brothers eventually arrived in Port Townsend, where Frederick worked as a carpenter for a while before moving on to Steilacoom and buying Ezra Meeker’s general merchandise store. By 1863, according to Hines, he tired of the life of a shopkeeper and resumed the pursuit of gold, this time at the Cariboo mines in British Columbia. That venture was short-lived, however, and before the end of the year he returned to Steilacoom to marry Ohioan Rosa Denger, with whom he would have six children. Then he began frequent trips to San Francisco to import goods for resale in Steilacoom in his own store, an occupation that kept him busy for the rest of his life, and apparently it was this store for which he needed Richter’s grain.
Brother Charles, meanwhile, remained in Port Townsend where, beginning with a bakery that sold crackers and breads for the crews of sailing ships, he expanded his holdings to include extensive residential and commercial real estate in the growing town. Eventually he became the lead of the so-called “Group of Five,” the men that controlled the economy of the city: the entry ports along the wharfs, the railroad, the first National Bank, several small commercial banks, and the steelworks, among others.
Charles Eisenbeis
The depression of 1893, and the shift of local politics to the left that followed, hit Charles severely, but not before he had built major structures to beautify the city, including the 120-bedroom Hotel Eisenbeis, which overlooked the site of the terminal proposed to receive the railroad (which it never did) and which never opened; a hospital; and a home for his family, “three floors in brick and stone, with a roof in slate and with the best comfort of that period.” That building still stands and is now a hotel called “Manresa Castle.” Charles’ footprints remain all over Port Townsend.
Charles died on March 9, 1902; his family received a telegram that Frederick, still in Steilacoom, had passed away the same day.
Over $22 of the debt to Richter was owed by James Cross, Puyallup Indian, or at least partly so. James (Pah-how-at-ish) was born not far from the eastern shore of American Lake. His father was William Cross, about whom I have been unable to find any information. Various sources attribute partial—as little as one quarter—to full Native American heritage to James, but apparently it was significant enough that he lived on the Puyallup Reservation and was buried in the Indian Willard (aka Firwood) Cemetery in Puyallup. These same sources do not agree on James’ date of birth, but he seems to have been in his mid to late twenties at the time of Richter’s death. James married Lucy (Dee Hop Day Hab Pey Ouge), who was a few years older than he, about 1877, and the couple and three children (Henry, Silas, and Guy), show up in the census of 1900 as living on the Reservation.
Lucy Cross died in 1916 at age sixty-six or -seven. James lasted another 14 years before succumbing to acute heart disease. Both were buried in Indian Willard Cemetery in Puyallup.
Coming next in The Germans Are Coming, Part 6, continued: All the neighbors turn out for the “pop-up sale” of Richter’s personal possessions; the auction of the land in Nisqually follows but then gets complicated; Mounts completes his assigned tasks; a divorce transforms the landscape.
[1]The Mounts Family at South Bay. Complied by Delbert J. McBride, a great-grandson of Daniel M. Mounts. Undated.
[3] Retired soldier John Rigney and his clan were early pioneers in Tacoma and Steilacoom and are represented by a number of descendants still in the region. See Town on the Sound.
[4] Hunt, H., Tacoma: Its History and Its Builders; a Half Century of Activity, Vol. 1, p. 231. 1916
[5] “The Murder of Bob: A clue to the source of Huggins’ memoirs,” by Dixie Lowman in Occurrences: The Journal of Activities at Fort Nisqually Historic Site, Vol. XI No. 1, Fall 1992.
[6] According to the Canadian government, “The Métis people originated in the 1700s when French and Scottish fur traders married Aboriginal women, such as the Cree, and Anishinabe (Ojibway). Their descendants formed a distinct culture, collective consciousness and nationhood in the Northwest. Distinct Métis communities developed along the fur trade routes.” https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/metis/Pages/introduction.aspx Accessed 6/1/2022
[8] The Muck area generally refers to the watershed of Muck Creek, a tributary of the Nisqually River, that runs west from the city of Roy to the river, some five miles north of Yelm.
[9]August Valentine Kautz, USA: Biography of a Civil War General, Lawrence G. Kautz. McFarland & Co., 2015
[10] An alternative view to Lawrence Kautz’s rather hero-worshiping biography of his relative, August Kautz, is provided by Nicole Ann Kindle in “The Many Wives of General August V. Kautz: Colonization in the Pacific Northwest, 1853-1895” (2019). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 5358. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.7231 (accessed 3/20/2022).
[11] This listing stays true to the original spelling and punctuation as much as possible. At this time half-cent pieces were still in use in Washington Territory and are indicated by the superscript 2; e.g. 122 would be twelve and a half cents.
Contrary to the preview with which I ended the previous post (The Germans are Coming, Part 4), I have decided to devote this entry to the life and times of Joseph Klee, Friedrich Richter’s partner in the Nisqually land purchased from August Wolff in 1874. I will bring Richter’s story to a close with a description of the estate sale that followed his death and those who attended it, a who’s who of well-known residents in the Nisqually area at the time, in Part 6.
Klee’s story is less dramatic than Richter’s—he didn’t get to Chicago until after the dust had settled on the Tanners and Grant’s election, as far as we know he didn’t dabble in real estate before coming to Nisqually, and he died at the ripe old age of 82, most likely in bed. But his story both has several tragic elements and sheds some light on the early development of commerce in late 19th Century Tacoma, especially the furniture-making industry, and especially by his fellow Germans. According to local historian, Ed Echtle, furniture making evolved as a companion to the Northwest’s lumber operations. With a ready supply of processed wood products, and the proximity of transportation hubs for rail and sea, the furniture business became “a key industry in Tacoma for nearly a century… Through the decades many significant furniture factories came and went, for a time making Tacoma the largest furniture-manufacturing center west of the Mississippi River.”[i] Klee and his fellow countrymen had an early hand in making this so.
19th Century Tacoma Waterfront University of Washington Special Collections
Joseph was born to Johann and Anna (Kalmon) Klee in Brohl, on the Rhone, in Prussia, on April 15, 1845. [ii] A vintner, Johann sent his son to school from age six to twelve, then employed him in the family business until he was seventeen, when he was apprenticed to Frederick Nachtsheim in the nearby town of Andernach for three years to learn the trades of blacksmith and general machinist. Joseph then worked in a factory in Brohl that manufactured pins, needles, and hooks for a year before emigrating at age twenty-two.
Klee arrived at the Port of New York in July, 1868. His travels in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and his naturalization as an American citizen in Berks County, Pa., have been mentioned previously (The Germans are Coming, Part 3).[iii] He made it to Chicago in the summer of 1870, and was working as a machinist there when the call from Governor Salomon came, via William Sternberg (see The Germans are Coming, Part 2). Klee joined Richter and over 100 others for the week-long trip by rail from Chicago to San Francisco and thence, by another week’s voyage on the steamer Idaho, to Steilacoom, where he promptly had all his clothes stolen at Fort Steilacoom. Presumably with new or borrowed attire, Joseph made his way to jobs on ranches in Puyallup and Portland, Or., with one failed attempt to find a job with the railroad in Kalama, after a 140-mile walk there, thrown in, one of the darkest times in his life, he later admitted (though there were some doosies yet to come!).
Humping it by shanks mare back from Portland, Klee made it to the Nisqually area in time to join Richter in buying Wolff’s 100 acres of marshland in 1874. Given his unfortunate employment history over the past few years, it isn’t obvious where his portion of the $450 purchase price came from, but the fact that within a year he had found a job as a machinist in a new foundry in Tacoma run by David Lister suggests that he might have had to make up for lost time, financially. And it was with the income from this work (in fact part of his first paycheck from Lister) that he began a lifetime of successful real estate investment in and around Tacoma that would allow him to expand his horizons.
Edward Huggins’ journal records Klee’s last-known day on the Nisqually land, September 8, 1879, when Huggins and his son, Tom, visited to observe the condition of their hay stacked there on the banks of the river. While Klee seems to have left for the Steilacoom-Tacoma region permanently, soon thereafter, he did return to be on hand for the sale of Richter’s estate conducted at the Mounts farm, at which he purchased most of the items his friend had left behind (to be described in the next post of this blog).
David S. Lister
Klee’s employer, the foundry owner Mr. Lister, deserves our attention, not the least for apparently having been the one to peak Klee’s interest in furniture manufacturing. David S. Lister, the rare non-German in our story, was born to Samuel and Sarah (Ogden) Lister in Yorkshire, England in 1821. He emigrated to the East Coast in 1847, seeking employment in the world of steamboats and maritime transportation around New York and Philadelphia, before heading west to Peshtigo, Wisconsin, on Green Bay, where he established a foundry and machine shop in the mid-1860s. Thus he was on hand to watch the entire town of Peshtigo, and his business, destroyed on October 8, 1871 by a forest fire, which, in its magnitude and deadliness, dwarfed the Great Chicago Fire that started the same day. By the time it was done, the Peshtigo fire was the largest forest fire in recorded history, burning 1,875 square miles (an area fifty percent larger than Rhode Island) and some 12-16 towns, and killing between 1,500 and 2,500 people, five times as many as died in the Chicago fire. Eight hundred alone died in Peshtigo [iv]
The Peshtigo Fire, October 8, 1871
Lister lost everything, but was able to rebuild, some say with help from Chicago financier and railroad man, William B. Ogden, who himself had lost a lumber company to the Peshtigo fire (and, in a double whammy, lost “most of his prized possessions” to the Chicago fire the same day[v]). But by 1874 Lister had had enough of Wisconsin and continued west to the growing metropolis on Puget Sound’s Commencement Bay. At the time, “Tacoma” was having birthing pains. Competing developers had filed plats for “Tacoma City” (McCarver) and “Tacoma” (Carr) by the time that the Northern Pacific Railroad chose Commencement Bay as the terminus of its transcontinental line in 1873, but then ignored both and built its depot two miles south of Tacoma City on a spot it called “New Tacoma.” Two years later the territorial legislature incorporated McCarver’s municipality known as Tacoma City, dubbing it the “City of Tacoma,” but the area was commonly known as “Old Tacoma.” In 1876 the legislature incorporated the Northern Pacific’s New Tacoma, and for a while there existed two independent municipalities, Old and New Tacomas, on the Bay.
That year, Lister built Tacoma Foundry and Machine Co. at what is now the corner of 17th Street and Pacific Avenue (then in New Tacoma) and soon was doing major jobs for the railroad. A biography of him written only four years later attributes the beginning of coke manufacturing in the Territory (“Upon the plentiful and inexpensive supply of this article the industrial future of the Pacific coast quite largely depends.”[vi]) to Lister, at Wilkinson, seven miles from Tacoma. Klee came to work early on for Lister, which he did for seven years, and so was on hand when furniture manufacturing was added to the portfolio.
David Lister sold off the furniture portion, by then known as the Tacoma Furniture Factory, to Frederick Bauerle (a German), just as Lister was elected mayor of New Tacoma on May 9, 1881, and just in time for an outbreak of smallpox that ultimately killed some 50 people, out of about 1,000 residents of the new town. An early insistence on an identification of the illness as chickenpox by several doctors delayed the appropriate treatment—quarantining of victims—and exacerbated the spread of the disease; it took nearly a month for the diagnosis of smallpox by a newly arrived physician, Dr. Francis B. H. Wing, to be accepted (but that’s another story).[vii]
At this point I need to bring in two more of Klee’s (and Richter’s) fellow German immigrants, one of whom we met before. Frederick (now Fred) Nachtsheim, who trained Klee as a blacksmith and general mechanic back in Prussia, had by this time immigrated with his extended family to the Northwest. Though significantly older than the 30-something Klee, for $3,000 Nachtsheim brought his young friend in on the purchase of a flour mill located on Steilacoom Lake. This lake actually is a reservoir that began life as a small pond in a wetland but became a full-fledged “lake” when Andrew Byrd dammed the “Steilacoom River” (now known as Chambers Creek) to supply his sawmill with water in 1853.
Byrd’s Mill from the Lakewood Historical Society
We haven’t formally met the other German before, but like Klee, he was one of “Salomon’s Army,” the group of over 100 Germans that travelled to the Pacific Northwest at the governor’s invitation in 1870. Gustav Frederick Christian Bresmann (Gus, to his friends) was born to Emanuel and Mary (Verke) Bresemann near Stralsund in northern Germany in 1845, making him the same age as Klee. After an apprenticeship in furniture making and a stint in the army that took him to war with Austria and her allies. Bresemann reached Chicago in 1869, in time to join the trek westward. He had been trained as a carpenter and cabinet maker, and as he told a newspaper man, E.T. Short, some sixty-five years later, one of his first jobs was working on new buildings for the garrison of Fort Steilacoom.[viii] Soon after arriving he filed a donation land claim on the edge of Steilacoom Lake, about a mile and a half west of the current city of Lakewood, and within a year acquired the nearby Byrd sawmill which, with business partner August Burow (another German immigrant), he converted to a furniture factory, the first in Pierce County, and began providing fine pieces to homes in Steilacoom, Olympia, and Tacoma and environs. (Some years before, Byrd had been murdered by a “hallucinogenic” neighbor, according to Short; but see below, The Murder of Andrew Byrd, for a fuller and more accurate treatment of this story.)
By 1876 Bresemann relocated to a farm on the northeast side of Spanaway Lake, about ten miles southeast of Steilacoom Lake, building there a new water-powered sawmill and continuing his furniture-making business, still in partnership with Burow. He started a family by marrying seventeen year-old Bertha Vogel from Peoria, Ill., in 1877. The Spanaway enterprise came to an end in 1888, when the Tacoma Light and Power Company bought him out in order to supply water to the city.[ix] The following year, Joseph Klee joined Bauerle in ownership of a new version of the Tacoma Furniture Factory, located at 25th and H streets in town (now located scant blocks from Burlington Northern’s rail yard between the Puyallup River on the east, the Foss Waterway on the west, I-5 to the south, and Route 509 to the north).
The Tacoma Daily News announced the arrival of the new factory on October 31, 1889, with the headline, “FURNITURE FACTORY: A Plant that will Supply a Big Demand.” Noting that Bauerle & Klee was one of the first firms to buy a lot in this section of town, the TDN reported that Bauerle had tried his luck in furniture manufacturing in Southern California during the real estate boom there set off by the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1885 and the resulting fierce competition with the formerly monopolist control of the Southern Pacific. The boom collapsed in less than two years (though it led to the formation of the County of Orange in 1889, and we know where that went!), and Bauerle returned to Tacoma, “the place of his first choice.”
In reporting an interview with Bauerle, the managing partner of the firm, the TDN said that “Messers. Bauerle & Klee have united strength, financially, and will establish a plant in every particular in keeping with the GROWTH OF THE CITY.” The plant, three stories tall with a 90 by 130 ft. footprint, was expected to cost $50,000, all told, and to employ a workforce of forty men, with a payroll of no less than $2,500 a month. “We will manufacture all kinds of furniture and will sell exclusively to the retail dealers or jobbers,” Bauerle was quoted as saying.
By this time, Klee had acquired an extended family. Sometime around 1881, he traveled to Germany to visit his widowed mother, Anna, and in short order returned to Tacoma with her and a sister and brother. In 1884 Klee ended his thirty-nine-year-long bachelorhood by wedding Mary Anne Niessen (a German, of course) from Steilacoom, and together they produced three children in quick succession. Tragedy soon caught up with the family, however, as Joseph’s wife and two youngest children died in 1888 (possibly of typhus); only the oldest, Anna, survived the year. In 1890 Klee was married a second time, to Anna Maria Gertrude Schmitz, a niece of his old friend, Fred Nachtsheim. Father Peter Francis Hylebos, a Belgian to whom is attributed the major expansion of a Catholic presence in the region, conducted the services. Hylebos’s main function seems to have been to provide properties and support to a succession of Sisters from various orders who opened service facilities in the Puget Sound region, including orphanages and hospitals like St. Josephs in Tacoma and St. Peter hospital in Olympia.
Then disease and death stuck again, claiming the lives of Joseph’s daughter, Anna, and his wife Anna Maria’s first-born, two-year-old Marie. Joseph and Anna Maria went on to have eight more children, however, five of whom survived well into the second half of the 20th Century.
After Gus Bresemann sold his operation at Spanaway Lake, he bought out Bauerle’s interest in the Tacoma Furniture Factory and began a partnership there with Klee in 1889, bringing up three sons in the furniture trade.
Bresemann & Klee’s furniture store at 25th and H streets in Tacoma
According to journalist Short, Bresemann & Klee “soon gained a wide reputation for its fine furniture,” which graced the home of Governor Ferry in Olympia, as well as “the finest homes in Tacoma.”
Workers at Bresemann & Klee
Bresemann retired in 1902-3, but the factory operated at least until 1906. In 1910, two years after the death of his wife, Bertha, Bresemann, now 65, began managing an amusement park that had been opened by Tacoma Railway & Power Company on the Spanaway property some years before. The park, which was served by streetcars from the city, included a dancehall, boathouse, shooting gallery, restaurant, and swimming facilities. Gus, a member of the Germania Society and Lodge Chiller Hein, No. 1, of the Order of Druids, died in 1937 at age ninety-two.
At the turn of the century, Klee began a 26-year term of employment with the Northern Pacific Railroad as a mechanic. He took up residence at “Klee’s Point” on Lake Steilacoom (cited in his obituary as a favorite camping ground for summer campers) and, as early as 1896, in the Midland area southeast of Tacoma, near the trolley stop at Johnson’s Crossing. Joseph and Anna Maria were Catholic, and were charter members of the Holy Rosary Church established in 1891 to serve Tacoma’s German-speaking population by Egidius Junger, Bishop of Nesqually [sic] from 1879 to 1895, himself a German from Prussia.[x]
Forty-seven years after the death of Friedrich Richter, Joseph Klee died in 1927 at age eighty-one, of pneumonia, according to his wife. He was buried in Tacoma’s Calvary Cemetery, not far from Father Hylebos, who had succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918. Anna Maria Klee died fifteen years later, surrounded by her surviving children.
The Murder of Andrew Byrd
The shooting of Andrew Byrd, an early pioneer who created Steilacoom Lake, and the subsequent hanging of the shooter, J.M. Bates, in January, 1863, has been called “one of the best documented cases of vigilante justice in Washington.”[xi] Byrd, from Ohio, was thirty-eight at the time of his death; ten years before he had built the dam to create Steilacoom Lake, and had a saw mill, a grist mill, and a slaughter house there. According to Leland Athow, who assembled “a brief history of the Adam Byrd branch of the Byrd family” in 1953, Andrew “was a man of sterling character and enjoyed the highest esteem of all decent and respectable citizens of the county. Being a public spirited man, he spared no effort in promoting the school, library, Masonic Lodge, roads and other activities that benefitted the community.” A newspaper account at the time said Byrd, then a Pierce County commissioner, was “a dutiful son, a kind and generous brother, a devoted husband, and an affectionate father. He leaves behind him, to mourn his loss, an aged mother, who resided with him since he has been amongst us, and whose declining years have been tenderly cared for by him; also a sister and six brothers, and a fond, inconsolable wife and three innocent little children.” Hyperbole, to be sure, but there seems to be no doubt that Byrd was a popular man.[xii]
While the several accounts differ in many details, there is general agreement that Byrd and Bates, a man variously described as “a half-wit” and “insane,” had had a disagreement regarding some livestock, and that Bates lay in wait in Steilacoom for several days until Byrd came to town on business. Coming upon Byrd inside, or just outside, the post office, Bates shot him twice and was only prevented from planting a third ball in the unfortunate man by a faulty pistol and the intervention of bystanders. Bates was swiftly jailed under the watchful eye of Sheriff Steven Judson, while Byrd was carried to Galliher’s Hotel to be attended by Dr. Steinberger. The accounts differ as to what Bates may have said at the time; some have said he kept this own council, others that he uttered a desire to dispatch several others, including a Dr. Spinning and a Mr. Montgomery. In some, Byrd himself was heard to name, blame as an instigator of Bates’ behavior, and forgive a mysterious Mr. X, who the Puget Sound Herald reported as having fled to Oregon soon thereafter.
While there later would be some confusion as to Byrd’s condition after the shooting, it seems that it didn’t take Dr. Steinberger long to determine that his wounds would be fatal. Writing thirty years later, William D. Vaughn was not at all hesitant about his role in what followed, and was ready to act that very evening: “I tried to organize a company and go and hang Bates that night, but they would do nothing until morning.” Byrd lingered until 10 o’clock the following evening, and by the time he expired Vaughn had had more success. “I found twenty men who agreed to hang him if Byrd died, but I wanted to string him up then for it was plain that his intentions were to kill Byrd on the spot.”
Steilacoom’s Commercial Street in the 1880s Washington State Historical Society (2014.0.308)
The following morning Vaughn and others constructed a gallows at an old stable near the jail and then went to get the prisoner. As the Puget Sound Herald put it, “With a coolness and deliberation credited to all concerned the people set about the necessary arrangements which were concluded at noon, shortly after which, to the number of about a hundred, and embracing the most worthy and responsible men of the county, they went in a body to the jail.” Aided and abetted by well-known businessmen, entrepreneurs, and perpetual seekers of political office (and sinecures) Erastus Light and Phillip Keach, the mob found the sturdy jail barricaded by Sheriff Judson. After battering the door with axes, sledges, pick axes, and a battering ram to no avail, the crowd was advised by Light to remove the bricks of the door’s jambs and lift it out in one piece, which they did. Sheriff Judson was quickly overwhelmed and “forcibly borne away by bystanders.” Moments later, “the murderer was in the hands of his executioners, the neighbors, friends, and the avengers of the pure and good man he had slain.”
Before they strung him up, Bates was given the chance to make any dying requests, and versions of the story have him speaking with a Mr. J. R. Meeker and to Mr. Light; yet another version has them both refusing to meet with him. Then, in short order, “An appropriate prayer was made by Rev. Sloan, and after being blind-folded, his body was suspended by the neck and his soul launched into eternity.”
The Puget Sound Herald summed it up thusly: “This, the verdict of the people has been executed. Let this fearful loss of a good and generous friend and useful member of the community and the just but awful punishment of his murderer, be a lesson in the future to those who contemplate the commission of crime.” William Vaughn was a bit more direct: “Bates was hung in the morning and when I left town after dinner time his body was still hanging. Thus ended the life of one of the cowardly dastardly fiends of crime which infested this coast a few years ago.”
As Mr. Vaughn intimates, the lynching of Mr. Bates was not all that unusual an event in a region that was slowly becoming of age.
Preview: The Germans are Coming, Part 6.
Who got Richter’s Meerschaum pipe and bugle? The sale of Richter’s land and belongings, right down to his underwear and handkerchiefs, takes place at the home of Daniel Mounts. Joseph Klee attends, as do many neighbors from illustrious pioneer families. Also there was Ernest Serfling of Steilacoom, yet another German by birth, a fact that would have great significance for the Bragets, when it became the Norwegians’ turn.
[ii] I am much indebted to the Rev. H.K. Hines, D.D. who, during the life times of Klee and Gustav Bresemann, whom we will meet in a bit, wrote a volume that was published by Lewis Publishing Company in Chicago in 1893 under two titles, (1) History of Washington, Pen & Pictures from the Garden of the World, and (2) An Illustrated History of the State of Washington Containing a History of the State of Washington from the Earliest Period of its Discovery to the Present Time, together with Glimpses of its Auspicious Future, Illustrations and Full-page Portraits of some of its Eminent Men and Biographical Mention of many of its Pioneers and Prominent Citizens of to-day. Both contain biographies for Klee and Bresemann, apparently based on interviews with the men themselves.
[iii] Klee’s naturalization papers, like those of Kenny Braget’s grandfather, Ole O. Braget, included a statement of renunciation of any former allegiances, to wit: “and I do hereby renounce and relinquish any title or order of Nobility to which I am or hereafter may be entitled; and that I do absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign Prince, Potentate, State, and Sovereignty whatever, and particularly to the Emperor of Germany of whom I was before a subject.”
[viii] E.T. Short, “After Many Years,” in The Tacoma Times, October 26, 1936.
[ix] 134 years later, Pierce County and the Chambers-Clover Watershed Council celebrated the reopening of the headwaters of Spanaway Creek to salmon migration with the completion of a new channel that bypasses the dams built first by Gus Bresemann, for his lumber mill, and later by others. Bresemann Forest, on the north shore of Spanaway Lake, is named for him.
[x] At last report this church building was slated for demolition; Holy Rosary Parish was amalgamated and merged into neighboring St. Ann Parish on July 1, 2021.
[xii] Gary Reese, that inestimable historian formerly of the Pacific Northwest Room of the Tacoma Public Library, assembled a number of accounts of the shooting of Byrd and the subsequent lynching of J.M. Bates, including versions provided by Steilacoom residents Erastus Light and William D. Vaughn, and Athow’s version assembled from contemporary reports published in the Puget Sound Herald. See 4. Andrew Byrd, J.M. Bates and the Steilacoom Vigilantes,http://www.usgennet.org/usa/wa/state/andrewbyrd.html, accessed 11/17/2021.
After the excitement of Chicago during the 1868 election, the Tanners’ parades and other gatherings (see The Germans are Coming, Part 3 of this blog), the next phase of Friedrich Richter’s life must have seemed rather staid and a little colorless. But it was then that he got back to what probably was the main reason for leaving home in Prussia: to find a little piece of the New World for himself. Unfortunately, that took a lot longer than he had hoped.
Friedrich Richter
Whether or not Richter had heard the admonition to “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” that was the point of the compass to which he now directed his attention.[i] This, despite the fact that many of his close relatives had ended up in German communities in other states to the east. Among the family correspondence in the “Richter archives” provided to me by Bud McBride in Nisqually were letters from a brother, Emil, in South Bend, Indiana, and from his Clemens cousins in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where their father had established a saw mill. Richter’s sister, Liddy, and her husband, Andre Zenke, eventually also took up residence in Wisconsin, at Saukville on Lake Michigan. But, by 1869, Richter was receiving mail from cousin Henry Schmidt in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and it was to that town, 460 miles west of Chicago, that he first journeyed. The railroad had reached Council Bluffs two years before, and for Richter it became a jumping off spot for visits to Sioux City, Omaha, and eventually the brand new “town” of Blair City, Iowa. There he, like his countryman, August Wolff, had done in the Nisqually area, he tried his young hand at land speculation, and failed.
Building the U.S., by railroad
John Insley Blair (1802-1899), for whom Blair City, Blairstown, Blairsburgh, and plain old Blair would be named, was a piece of work. Born in New Jersey at the turn of the century, Blair deserved the sobriquets “self-made businessman,” and “capitalist” as much as any man of his era. Beginning his run at age 10, when he informed his mother that he was going to get rich, Blair amassed a $70 million fortune and owned more railroad milage than anyone else in the world before he was done.[ii]
John Insley Blair
Years of speculation in retailing and wholesaling of local produce, operation of flour mills, the manufacture of cotton products, and coal and iron mining led to an interest and investment in railroads, which Blair began building in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1840s. Railroad construction took him to Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota Territory, Missouri, Texas, and Iowa. As an official of many of the small railroads that sprang up in the mid-West in anticipation of the transcontinental line, and in response to the federal land give away, Blair was influential in determining where the railroad lines went (and so who made money). Some communities tried to court his favor by naming themselves after him; others he named himself.
In Benton County, Iowa, locals laid out a town on the high ground along the Chicago & North-Western in 1862, a year after the railroad was completed to that point. In 1868 it was incorporated as Blairstown, named after the village in New Jersey where Blair began his rise to financial stardom and from which he managed his extraordinary holdings. In Hamilton County, to the west, a town was platted in 1857 at a stagecoach stop in anticipation of the arrival of the Dubuque & Pacific, and named Hawley after an official of that railroad. Twelve years later, in 1869, the iron horse, now called the Dubuque & Sioux City Railroad, approached, and Chief Engineer/President John Blair was on hand to seek land concessions from the original Hawley investors. Receiving none, Blair platted his own town about a mile to the north, calling it Blairsburgh. (As it turns out, it is possible the Hawley folks knew best. Blairsburg(h)’s population reached its peak of 288 souls in 1980, and has been in decline ever since.)
Five or so more counties further to the west, but still in Iowa and on the banks of the Missouri River, Cherokee County residents William and Ines Van Eeps heard that Blair planned to build a depot for the Dubuque & Sioux City in their area. So they platted and named Blair City in 1869 to induce him to do so in their community. At the same time the magnate himself was establishing a new town called Blair, across the river in the newly-minted state of Nebraska, with the purchase of an 1,075-acre tract of land. (One hundred and fifty years later, Blair is still the county seat of Washington County, Nebraska, and is a small but thriving community with a population of about 8,000.)
Sniffing out an opportunity, in early August, 1869, young Richter had forwarded to him at the Chicago House in Sioux City two money orders totaling fifty dollars. By August 9th he had decided to take a chance on the future of the Van Eeps’ Blair City, for he plunked down twenty dollars as half payment for a third of a lot, “the middle 22 ft off from lot one in Block three,” in their twenty-acre plat, according to a receipt signed by William Van Eeps himself. In late January, 1870, Richter paid the second half and became the rightful owner of the one-third lot.
Richter’s receipt from Van Eeps
But then John Blair did it again. When it came time for the Dubuque & Sioux City to cross the Missouri River into Nebraska, the magnate avoided existing towns and built a depot on the Iowa side about a mile and a half from the Blair City site. Adjacent river towns were plundered for their churches and businesses, and by the end of 1869 the crossing site, called New Cherokee, boasted hardware and dry goods stores, a bank, a hotel, and a newspaper. Cherokee (pop. 5,253) still exists. Blair City died on the vine.
Richter’s hopes were dashed. When the news came that the long-awaited depot and railroad would be built a little to the west, his plans for making a killing evaporated. So, too, did those of the Van Eeps (or Van Epps, or VanEps). But only temporarily, for William Van Eeps, an entrepreneur since an early age, was on his way to becoming what the local press called “The Richest Man in South Dakota” for his extensive land holdings in counties and towns all over the territory and state and in Minnesota and Iowa.
By this time events that were to transplant Richter to Washington Territory before year’s end had been set in motion. After the disappointment in Blair City, the next step was for President Grant to appoint Edward Salomon 9th Governor of Washington Territory.
But before we go on, I need to reacquaint you with William Sternberg, the German furrier who ended up in Olympia, Washington Territory, sharing a boarding house life with August Woolf, then owner of the Nisqually land of interest to us (See The Germans Are Coming, Part 2). You will remember that Sternberg, a resident of Chicago, was convinced by Salomon to move to the new territory to harvest the fur-bearing animals there. Then Salomon induced him to return to the windy city to act as a shill and convince their fellow countrymen to accompany him back to the wilds of the west coast. Turns out that Friedrich Richter and a friend, Joseph Klee, were among the “considerable number of emigrants” that responded.[iii]
Klee had emigrated in 1867 in his late teens, from Brohl on the Rhine in Prussia, most likely by way of Bremerhaven. Joseph had worked in his father’s vineyard as a youth, but then had apprenticed to Frederick Nachtsheim, a blacksmith and general machinist, to learn a trade (remember that name). While Richter was becoming part of the immigrant German community in Chicago, Klee explored western Pennsylvania (where he was naturalized in Berks County in 1868) and Ohio for three years, before ending up in Chicago in 1870 as well, where he found work.
In June of that year, Richter received news of Salomon’s appointment to the territorial governorship from Hermann Kaestner, a tobacconist with whom he had stayed on Wells Street in Chicago (see The Germans are Coming, Part 3 of this blog). Returning to Chicago, that summer he joined Klee (it is unclear whether the two were already friends, or just fellow seekers) and about 100 others that responded to the Governor’ call, relayed by Mr. Sternberg, and headed west. Mrs. Blankenship described their journey to the Puget Sound region:
The trip was made by rail on the second train making the transcontinental trip. When Oakland [California] was reached the party embarked on the steamer Idaho with Capt. Doane. This was the last sea trip of this doughty old sea captain, as after that he settled down in Olympia and started the famous Home of the Pan Roast.[iv]
When the colonists reached Steilacoom, the majority of them remained at the military post at that place. Governor Salomon had made arrangements for their support, until the men could locate on homesteads. In addition to this encouragement, the homeseekers were supplied with teams, farming implements and supplies, payment to be made out of the crops as the settlers were able.[v]
The steamer Idaho
Young bachelors, Richter and Klee apparently weren’t ready to settle down right away (or become indebted to Salomon for that matter), but instead went looking for work. Klee eventually found it on a ranch in Puyallup, but then, hoping to make use of his skills as a mechanic, a year later he walked the 140 miles to Kalama, where he had been told work with the railroad, which was then making its way north to Puget Sound, could be found. This tip didn’t pan out, however, and Klee was forced to ask for assistance from Salomon, who found him a job on another ranch outside Portland. Meanwhile, Richter began receiving his mail in Steilacoom, but worked for the next couple of years in the sawmills of Port Madison and the city of Tacoma, whose population of immigrant Germans was growing at a great rate.
While Richter and Klee began to settle into their adopted homeland of the Pacific Northwest, Salomon’s tenure there was short-lived. The Governor was barely into the second year of his four-year term in Washington Territory when his political leanings brought him into conflict with Colonel Elisha P. Ferry, a crony of Grant and Lincoln, also newly-arrived in the Territory from Illinois.
Elisha P. Ferry, two-term governor of Washington Territory and first governor of Washington State
Ferry and Salomon opposed one another in their choice of territorial representative to Congress, and when Ferry’s candidate went to Washington City, that gentleman convinced Grant that Salomon was a threat to the Republican Party and had him removed (in favor of Ferry, of course). Salomon moved on to California, but not before the state legislature passed a resolution thanking him for “his prompt attention to the acts of the legislative assembly, and his approval of their measures enacted into laws.” Salomon spent the next 40 years of his life in San Francisco laboring in the fields of law and politics, before passing away in 1913.[vi]
Life and Death at Nisqually
Daniel Morgan Mounts
Happily, at this point the source of the life narratives for Richter, in the years remaining to him, and Klee—up until now the packet of letters, membership cards, advertisements, and photographs provided to me by Bud McBride—are supplemented by accounts, both contemporary and as reminiscences, by at least two neighbors of the Nisqually land. Closest was Daniel Mounts, who had purchased Joel Myers’ donation land claim, just east of the delta, in 1867, just four years before Wolff was to buy the land on river’s edge from the Goves (see The Germans are Coming, Part 1 of this blog). As he began to build his dynasty—1000 acres of land and a family with 12 children—Mounts kept a journal of everyday occurrences, including brief notations on the comings and goings of his neighbors and people of note, the weather, and business transactions, that is available in the Delbert McBride Collection at the Washington State Historical Society.
Edward Huggins
The second informant is Edward Huggins, a long-time employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Nisqually, located just a few miles to the northeast of the delta. Huggins was promoted to be chief trader in charge of the fort in 1859 when Dr. William Fraser Tolmie, the Chief Factor, was reassigned to Fort Victoria. Ten years later, when the United States bought the Hudson’s Bay Company’s remaining holdings and the fort was closed, Huggins filed a claim for the land it was on and turned it into a farm. He became an American citizen and went on to become active in Pierce County politics. But he is best known for his journaling, at the fort and after, and for his extensive reminiscences and writings about the early history of the south Puget Sound region composed some thirty years later. His writings are available in the Special Collections of the University of Washington Library.
On August 10, 1870, Huggins’ journal records the arrival of the steamer Idaho at Steilacoom with “upwards of 100 German immigrants, who intend to settle somewhere in the Territory,” (and including Richter, at least—there is some evidence that Mr. Klee may have tarried in San Francisco before moving on to the Puget Sound region eventually). By now the Hudson’s Bay Company’s holdings had been turned over to the United States; Governor Salomon’s visit to Huggin’s new farm on his way to Steilacoom two days after Christmas that year may have been a courtesy call, or possibly an effort to verify that the HBC actually was departing as promised.
The influx of German immigrants to the Nisqually delta area took a while to get going. August Wolff was in Olympia in 1870 and purchased the Goves’ land in 1871. In April of that year Huggins reported the arrival of two Germans at his farm, one of whom, a “Mr. Hanspetre” [sic] bought four cows from him. Huggins does not mention Wolff, possibly because young August appears to have been more of a speculator than a hands-on farmer.
In June, 1872, Huggins is again paid a visit by Governor Salomon (then more of an honorary title, as Salmon had been displaced by his successor, Elisha P. Ferry, two months before). In February, 1873, Huggins recorded the arrival of a “poor German Traveler,” who asked for two or three months’ work in exchange for his board and some clothes. The man, who Huggins identified as “F. Fenau,” worked until dinnertime the next day and then disappeared.
By the following July, Richter and Wolff are corresponding, and the sale of the land, one hundred acres of Nisqually Marsh for $450, to Richter and Klee, takes place in 1874. For the next six years, Huggins and the two young Germans exchanged products, labor, and favors as neighbors do. Huggins bought marsh grass, as fodder for cattle, pickets, and cedar stakes from Richter and 60 bushels of barley “at .60¢ per bushel” as well as “a yoke of fine, seven-year-old work oxen for $55.00, payable in Jan’y next,” from Klee. Huggins’ employee, an Indian named Bill or Willie Huggins, mowed 20 acres of Richter and Klee’s “hay” (probably more marsh grass, “a poor article injured by Rain and tide water,” according to Huggins), and in return for help in threshing, Richter assisted with the dipping of sheep in tobacco water, as a pesticide, at Huggins’ place.
In addition to marsh grass and grains, the young men raised cows, sheep, and chickens and traded with local provisioners, like Mrs. Louisa Goodtime of Steilacoom.[vii] One shopping list shows they bartered twenty-two and a half dozen eggs, twenty-five cow hides and two-and-a-half deer skins for a long list of essential tools, including a plow, a harrow, a mattock, a hoe, a shovel, a rake, a crosscut saw, a scythe, baskets, fishhooks and matches.
Richter’s shopping list at Mrs. Goodtime’s mercantile
Ready cash may have been hard to come by; in 1875 Richter borrowed $140 from Goodtime’s husband and business partner, Hyman, “In Gold Coin for value received with interest at the rate of one and one-half per cent per Month till paid.” The loan was paid off by the end of the year with the help of $60 from the sale of six acres of their marsh land to Georges Remond (also referred to as Raymond and Ramond in various documents), a friend and Frenchman from Port Townsend.[viii]
Richter’s cabin
Richter eventually built a small cabin on the edge of the river that survived for about 85 years (and became a play place for young Bragets. Thanks in part to Klee’s employment in a foundry in New Tacoma recently opened by David Lister, an immigrant from England by way of Philadelphia and Wisconsin, the pair was also able to purchase an adjacent upland parcel of 150 acres for $500, when railroad attorney Frank Clark and his wife, Lena, put it up for sale in 1876.[ix] Richter and Klee then split up their ownership. Richter took the 100 acres of the lowlands they had bought from Wolff, plus 50 acres of the uplands recently acquired from the Clarks.[x] Klee kept the remaining 100 acres of the Clark parcel to the north and east of Richter’s holdings for a while before selling it off. Richter bought back the six acres from Remond a year later (without taking a loss) with the help of another loan, this time $350 from Steilacoom businessman Jay Jacob Hoover.
Richter repays his loan to J.J. Hoover
After he and Klee split up the land, Richter continued to harvest nature’s bounty—marsh grass and cedar pickets and shakes—on the bottom land until 1880. Then, on May 1, 1880, Edward Huggins wrote in his journal, “It is reported that Richter has been drowned, when on his way from Walker’s Ferry [across the Nisqually, about a mile upriver] to his own place on the marsh.”
Richter had succumbed to the Nisqually, purportedly while attempting to ferry his mowing machine from the other side of the river, where it likely had been borrowed by a neighbor. Perhaps, as local historian Delbert McBride once suggested, he had partied a little too hard while visiting across the river.
It took some time to find Richter’s body after the drowning. Huggins reports that he was finally laid to rest two months later:
Wed. July 7 – Was informed this morning by [Daniel] Mounts that the body of F. Richter had been found in the Squally River. In the evening went down to Mount’s place with Eddie and Tom and assisted to convey the body to the ranch of the deceased, where we buried him. Reached home about 2 A.M.
Friedrich Theodor Richter died in his 30th year.
Preview: The Germans are Coming, Part 5.
The sale of Friedrich Richter’s estate reveals the sparse life of a bachelor farmer in the Nisqually. Joseph Klee moves on to Tacoma where he encounters old friends from home, and a young wife. His amusement park outlasts him.
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[iii]Early History of Thurston County, Washington Together with Biographies and Reminiscences of Those Identified with Pioneer Days, Mrs. George Blankenship, ed., Olympia, Washington 1914.
[iv] The story of Woodbury J. Doane’s oyster pan roast, “the like of which were not to be had anywhere else in the world, partly because the native oysters that went into them were super excellent, partly because no one else knew the combination,” is told at length at https://olympiahistory.org/funk-captains-doanes-oyster-pan-roast/. Accessed on 11/1/2021.
[v] Blankenship, Early History of Thurston County,
[vi] For more on Salomon’s life and times, see Prosch, Thomas W. “A Chronological History of Seattle, 1850–1899.” Typescript, University of Washington, Special Collections, Seattle, Washington, 1969, and Meany, Edward S., Governors of Washington, Territorial and State. Seattle: Dept. of Printing, University of Washington, 1915
[vii] Mrs. Goetheim (anglicized to Goodtime) and her husband, Hyman, were part of a wave of German-speaking Jews that immigrated to the Territory in the 1850s and 1860s. Others included Isaac and Seraphina Pincus, and Adolph and Sarah Goetheim. They provided Steilacoom with a close-knit merchant class, operating hardware and general-mercantile stores and offering some financial services. See Deborah K. Freedman’s excellent book, Tacoma’s Dry Goods & Wet Goods: Nineteenth Century Jewish Pioneers, Tacoma Historical Society Press, Tacoma, 2016.
[viii] Remond seems another one of those historical will-o-the-wisps, with little known back story or finishing chapter. After his brief go at land ownership in Nisqually, Georges moved onto Yelm but soon disappeared from any known records.
[ix] If all goes according to plan, the Clarks’ fascinating story, including Frank’s role as defense attorney at the murder trial of the Nisqually leader, Leschi, , will be featured in a later entry in this blog.
[x] This 150 acres became the centerpiece of the northern-most portion of the Braget farm.
When we left off, in The Germans are Coming, Part 2, August Wolff had just sold his parcel along the Nisqually River—land that would eventually become part of the Braget farm—to his fellow countrymen, Friedrich Richter and Joseph Klee, in 1874. Wolff’s hopes of making a killing on the purchase of the property from the Gove family, three years before, had been dashed when Olympia was left off the route of the railroad with the awarding of the western terminus of the Northern Pacific line to Tacoma. Like Wolff, Richter and Klee were among the young Germans recruited by the new Washington Territorial governor, Edward Salomon, and his henchman, John Sternberg, to travel from Chicago and pursue livelihoods and, hopefully, wealth in the wilds of the young territory.
The following account of the life of Friedrich Richter is a wonderful example of a combination of serendipity and good, hard work that can lead to exciting discoveries in the field of historical research, one that required both the forethought of Daniel Mounts and his descendants, and my own inability to accept the obvious answer (“when all other possibilities are exhausted, the remaining option, no matter how unlikely…”)
In June, 2002, while interviewing Bud McBride (Daniel Mounts’ great-grandson) and his partner, Richard Schneider, friends and neighbors of Kenny Braget, I had occasion to ask what they knew about “the Grape House,” an old log building that had once stood on the Braget property, down on the flats near a small inlet. Somewhere in our many hours of conversation, Kenny had mentioned that he used to play in the old place, which had earned its name because of a covering of grape vines, and remembered the name “Richter,” and that his father, Walt, had unearthed some human bones when working on a farm road nearby.
True to their form, which was to be entirely and tirelessly accommodating and seeming founts of endless local knowledge, Bud and Richard immediately showed me some black and white pictures of the old cabin that they had taken many years before.
The Grape House
Then they took me to the site, now a grassy point of higher land sticking out into the tide flats and overlooking what had been the Tacoma Duck Club’s exclusive shooting territory. Accessed by the bridge that Kenny Braget’s ancestors had built, and dotted with old fruit trees, the land was now part of the farm’s pasturage; the spot where Kenny’s dad had found the bones was not far away.
Then to my great delight, Bud and Richard showed me an old, sepia-toned photograph, purportedly of Friedrich Richter himself.
Friedrich Richter, 1868-69
The photo showed a short (5 feet 7 inches, I would eventually learn from his immigration papers), clean-shaven young man standing before a classic studio backdrop (draped cloth, an ornamental chair for somewhere to rest his hand, I expect), staring at the camera out of deep brown eyes. Most intriguingly, the young man was dressed in a military-style cap, a short, dark cape over what appeared to be a light-colored apron, dark pants with cuffs rolled half way up the shins, and dark boots. Hanging from a strap across his left shoulder and clasped in his right hand was what appeared to be a short bugle.
Holding the photograph carefully (but not carefully enough; as an archivist I knew I should have been wearing cotton gloves to protect the artifact, but at that point I was too excited to wait!), I turned it over. Written on the back, in pencil, were the words: Friedrich Richter photographed in Chicago – late 1860s. Left Chicago in 1870. And stamped below that was Tinsley Bros., Photographers, 121 South Clark.
Just a word about the image itself. As a photographer I was fascinated by it, but at the time woefully ignorant as to what I was holding. I would later learn that it was what had been called a cabinet card, a thin albumen print mounted on card stock, usually measuring 4.25 by 6.5 inches. About the time that this one was made, this style of portraiture was replacing the smaller carte de visite, which had been popular since the mid-1850s. The size of a business card, the cartes de visite were the “trading cards” of the 1860s, spawning the production of albums for personal collections and display, as well as for the collection of photographs of prominent people. Produced after the Civil War, the cabinet cards were a step more utilitarian. But both styles of cards provided the photographer with the opportunity to advertise his services, by inscriptions on the front or back, and thanks to the hard work of many hands, and Google, the information contained in those inscriptions often can reveal a good deal about the subject matter of the photograph. For example, the studio of the creators of the Richter cabinet card, J.W. and F.R. Tinsley, was only located at 121 Clark from 1868-1869, according to the Chicago City Directory, confirming the penciled date on the back of the card.[1]
Turning the card back over, I puzzled over the attire of the young man in the photograph. What was with the military-style cap, the cape and the bugle? Had Friedrich Richter, if in fact it was he, served in the Civil War? (To confound things, I would later learn that two men by the name of Friederick [note the different spelling] Richter had in fact served in the Union army, in companies from New York.) Looking closely I realized that someone seemed to have attempted to color the sepia-toned print with a black substance, imparting a shininess to the cape and part of the boots. Why? And why the light-colored cloth under the cape, apparently an apron? As far as I could remember, nothing like that had been part of a Civil War uniform. Mystery upon mystery!
Finally I looked up from the photograph to find Bud McBride holding out a thick packet of papers to me. At this point I began to totally lose it, because Bud told me that I was now in possession of an archive of papers from Friedrich’s estate, all the documents that he had left behind when he had drowned in the Nisqually River over 120 years ago. In my hands were more photographs, letters, and other personal papers that had been in the Mounts family’s possession since Daniel Mounts, Bud’s grandfather, had served as the trustee of Richter’s estate, after his death. This cache had been handed down by the Mountses to Bud’s brother, Delbert, the family historian; the penciled notes on the back of the cabinet card were his.
I would soon discover that before his death, in 1998, Del had preceded me in a fascination with Mr. Richter and paved the way for my own investigations. Bud and Richard had taken over the Richter materials, after Del was gone, along with carton after carton of files. These were the result of years of study of the Nisqually Valley and his family’s lives there, especially those of the Native Americans that joined the Mounts clan with the marriage of Daniel and Catherine, half-Scots, half-Nisqually, in 1860. Eventually Bud and Richard would share all this material with me. But for the moment I was awash in things Richter and wallowing in them.
It would take me several years to put together the pieces of Richter’s life that those “things,” and others, offered me. It took the services of a friendly German-American that tried to help me translate the archaic, colloquial language in a spidery scrawl that the letters and other documents contained, a (still continuing) education in German and German-American institutions of 19th century Midwest America, and two worn out keyboards before I felt that I had an interesting story to tell. But then, a final search in my own backyard, so to speak (the Washington State Archives in Olympia), turned up a major piece to the puzzle that was Friedrich Richter: a 77-page account of the processing of Richter’s estate by his appointed executor, Daniel Mounts. But I’m getting ahead of myself now; we’ll come back to that incredible discovery in a later blog post.
Friedrich Theodor Richter was born about 1850 in Sachen, in the kingdom of Saxony. To judge from the few photographs he left behind and by his literacy, his upbringing was middle class, and rural; he may have apprenticed in a trade in his teenage years, for later German-language documents refer to him as a mechaniker, a mechanic or engineer.[2] Friedrich had at least four siblings; two, Emil and Liddy, also immigrated to the United States, while Hermann and Anna apparently stayed behind.
According to his passport, seventeen year-old Richter left the port of Bremerhaven June 3, 1867. His correspondence has not yielded up the reasons for his leaving Germany. Surely for him and for the other Germans that came to the Nisqually, it was a combination of conditions at home, including the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and, possibly, the laws which ensured an inheritance only for the first-born son, and the lure of opportunities offered by the wide-open spaces of America. Europe had been flooded with tales of the wealth to be found in letters from earlier immigrants and from promoters of the country’s development, like the Puget Sound Business Directory:
The resources of the country are yet undeveloped. Commerce, with the exception of the lumber and coal trade, is dormant, and manufactories are comparatively unknown, despite the magnificent power at command and the large market for the sale of manufactured goods. The Territory does the largest lumber trade in the world, and a fleet of white-winged ships, laden with spars, masts and lumber can be seen daily treading their way through the waters of the Sound. The minerals of the Territory, which are rich and varied, with the exception of coal, have not been developed at all, hence capitalists have now an opportunity of monopolizing the copper or iron mines so numerous throughout the country, and by working them furnish employment to many persons. The laboring man can earn a livelihood with more facility and live cheaper than in other portions of the country.
Puget Sound Business Directory and Guide to Washington Territory, 1872, p. 18.
Thanks to the active encouragement of emigration by young transatlantic shipping companies like Norddeutscher Lloyd[3] in Bremen, young Richter, a willing worker with a range of skills, may have read something like the following excerpt, again from the Puget Sound Business Directory:
Many persons, doubtless, would be pleased to learn what class of mechanics, laborers and domestic servants are needed in the country, and the wages paid. To the first query we would say that any person able and willing to work, unless he be a follower of the muses, can find employment. The persons most needed are farmers, who are willing to hew themselves a home with their brawny arms, or have the means of improving land. Manufacturers are wanted to utilize in the country the productions of the country, and thus enrich that which should be enriched, and not allow all the profits and control of the commerce to fall into the hands of those who have no interest in the advancement of the Territory. Mechanics are wanted; blacksmiths and carpenters can find plenty of labor to perform, and at salaries of from three to five dollars per day in gold… Day laborers receive from forty to sixty dollars per month, and are always active, as large numbers are required around the mills, logging camps, and to work on wagon roads and railroads.
Puget Sound Business Directory, p, 59.
Friedrich likely emigrated with or soon after his brother Emil, his uncle, Clemens Schmidt, and three Schmidt cousins, Friedrich, Henry and Ernest. By early 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, he was one of over 130,000 German immigrants in Chicago. Early on, Richter lived with fellow immigrants from Saxony at a succession of addresses on South Wells Street, including one above a meat market there. Nicknamed “The Cabbage Patch” after being populated by German farmers in the 1850s, the Wells Street area along the east bank of the Chicago River is the center of “Old Town” Chicago today.
In 1868, at its May convention in Chicago, the delegates of the Republican Party unanimously nominated Ulysses S. Grant to be their presidential candidate. You will remember, from The Germans are Coming, Part 2, that Chicago politician, Edward S. Salomon, who had already attracted Grant’s attention with his extraordinary military service in the Civil War, would earn the territorial governorship of Washington with his strong support of the Radical Republicans and Grant for the presidency. It was the form of that support that probably brought Salomon to Friedrich Richter’s attention and most certainly explained the costume that Richter was wearing in the photograph supplied to me by Bud McBride. But to tell the story well, we should back up a bit, and take it up at the end of the Civil War with the creation of the G.A.R., the Grand Army of the Republic.
Founded in Decatur, Illinois, in 1866, the G.A.R. became one of the most influential of the many groups created by and for Union veterans, first for camaraderie and social connections, later for political purposes. According to a Wikipedia entry, “The GAR initially grew and prospered as a de facto political arm of the Republican Party during the heated political contests of the Reconstruction Era. The commemoration of Union Army and Navy veterans, black and white, immediately became entwined with partisan politics. The GAR promoted voting rights for Negro veterans, as many white veterans recognized their demonstrated patriotism and sacrifices, providing one of the first racially integrated social/fraternal organizations in America.”[4] Reflecting its membership and the times, the G.A.R. was organized along military lines, and its members wore military-style uniforms. In its day, the G.A.R. wielded incredible power. The endorsement of the G.A.R. veterans’ voting bloc was essential to the election of presidents Grant, McKinley, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison, all of whom, except for Chester A. Arthur, were members of the organization.
It was in the bosom of the G.A.R. that the “Tanners” were born, in 1868, only a few months after Richter’s arrival in Chicago and as a precursor to the presidential election pitting Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax, for the Radical Republicans, against Horatio Seymour of New York and Francis P. Blair, for the Democrats. On July 24th of that year, a critical meeting took place in the 10th Ward of Chicago involving three supporters of the Republican persuasion, members of the G.A.R. all: General R.W. Smith, Major J.R. Hayden, and General Edward S. Salomon (then Cook County Clerk). Feeling that a recent ward meeting “had been indifferently attended,” Major Hayden suggested they start something like the “old Wide-Awake organization” to liven things up. To quote the response of an unnamed writer for the Chicago Tribune, possibly the editor-in-chief, Horace White, to whom I am much indebted for this story, “That is just what is needed to interest the young men [all recently returned from war, remember] and give them a chance to work where they will feel they are helping the Grant and Colfax cause. Men get tired of formal club meetings and speeches of local orators. They all read the papers, and are pretty well posted on the political issues of the day; but give the ‘boys’ something to do requiring physical as well as mental effort—something where they can exhibit and demonstrate their feelings and sentiments on the issues, and you will have plenty of volunteers to make it a grand success, just as the Wide-Awakes proved to be.”[5]
Now while the use of torchlight parades in political campaigns had begun in the 1830s, the Republican-organized Wide Awakes, a youth group that wore distinctive oilcloth capes and caps (sound familiar?) and carried torches and banners in support of Lincoln’s campaign in 1860, were the first to use torchlight parades systematically as a political technique.[6] Major Hayden had been a member of the organization, and remembered “the enthusiastic arder [sic] for Republican principles which that organization diffused among our young men.” He asked, “What shall we call our new organization?” Noting that “Wide Awakes” was past its prime, and that Republicans in South Bend, Indiana, were forming a club called “Fighting Boys in Blue” to counter the Democrats’ new organizations called “White Boys in Blue” (yes, a decidedly racist name), the editor suggested that the name be short, pithy, and apropos. Major Hayden then offered one suggested by General Smith (and approved of by Gen. Salomon and others): “Tanners.”
U.S. Grant Presidential Poster for his 2nd Term
The conversation in print continued: “Editor: Capital idea; Just the name to take with the people; perfectly descriptive of the situation. Grant was raised a tanner, and the Democrats are sneering at the thought of a tanner being President, just as they did at “Old Abe” for having been a rail-splitter; but the stigma did not lose him many votes that I know of. [In contrast, Horatio Seymour was the white-collar son of a successful businessman and politician, and already had served as governor of New York twice.] Major Hayden: That’s it. ‘Democrats bring your hides and Grant will tan ‘em.’’’ At this point the discussion turned to the appropriate uniform for “the boys.” The editor suggested a tanner’s apron, and for the rest, “something handsome, but not too expensive or easily soiled or torn.” Hayden remembered the Wide Awakes’ durable and water-proof oil-cloth cape and cap, and a torch. After getting the editor to swear his undying fealty to the cause and to sign up as a member of the Tanner Club (“And if I don’t attend its meeting fine me, and I’ll pay the fines; ‘pay or play,’ you know.”), Hayden took the idea to a meeting in the 10th Ward that evening, where the name “Grant Tanners” and the suggested uniform were adopted by those gathered, including Generals Smith and Salomon. The editor wrote up the results of the meeting for The Tribune, and reported that the name “took like wildfire.” Within a fortnight a thousand Tanner Clubs had sprung up; by the end of September of that year (1868), there were at least ten thousand “Tanner companies” in the country, most of them in the larger cities like Chicago.
Richter’s Invitation to a Drill of Tanners Company B
By August 29, 1868, Friedrich Richter had received an invitation to attend a drill event of Company B of the Tanners that evening at the county courthouse from one Captain J.S. Sweet. The short notice given may have had something to do with the fact that, the evening before, a group of White Boys in Blue, young toughs in connivance with a couple of aldermen, had broken up an assembly of Irish Tanners. A reporter for The Evening Post, another of Chicago’s newspapers heavily favoring the Republican cause, wrote:
Last night, at about ten o’clock, the announcement of a political riot in the Eighth Ward caused a great excitement in the city. Republicans who were acquainted with the virulent type of Copperheadism[7] pervading the district in question, and the desperate extremities to which [candidate for President] Seymour’s “friends” can proceed in the practical demonstration of their friendliness, were unprepared for such a murderous outrage as was perpetrated last night with the tacit connivance of two Democratic Aldermen. The affair in toto reflects in the most disgraceful and humiliating manner on the instigators of the riot, who in their demeanor and language proved sufficiently the insincerity of their howlings for universal freedom of speech. It has resulted in the murder of an innocent young man, and in severe injuries to several others, and in showing more clearly than ever the demoniac spirit of the bogus Democracy.[8]
Birthed by the Democratic Party at state conventions in April of the year, the White Boys in Blue were largely made up of Union soldiers, like the Tanners, but shared the strong and often bitter opposition of their party to voting by African Americans, to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been organizing black schools in the South, and to Republican reconstruction policies in general.[9] Organized militarily, and with veteran officers at the heads of their companies, both the Tanners and the White Boys in Blue sought to increase voter turnout in national elections by throwing wildly enthusiastic and fantastic torchlight parades while dressed in uniforms reminiscent of the Union Army. In every city, torch-bearing soldiers marched to the local railroad station as an escort to a group of the most prestigious local dignitaries, intent upon meeting arriving political celebrities and accompanying them to their hotel or the site of a well-advertised event. According to Charles Goff, “Military bands, fireworks, bonfires, and booming cannon added heightened excitement to the occasion. Once arrived at the county courthouse or meeting hall where the speakers were to give their orations, the appearance of the torchlight soldiers in their colorful uniforms, their cheering, their singing and their patriotically impressive presence added to the political excitement of the evening.”[10]
The uniforms of the torchlight soldiers of both stripes were highly colorful, both for visibility and political emphasis. Goff described Tanner uniforms of blue oilcloth caps, with a white top and a red, white, and blue band, along with white or red oilcloth capes (protecting the wearer’s clothing from rain and/or kerosene drippings from their torches), and, of course, the leather aprons that indicated their Tanner affiliation. Officers wore U.S. Army insignia, NCOs wore stripes. The choice of colors, though, was a local decision, and groups that had been organized along particular lines, such as ethnic origin or type of employment, embellished their uniforms in distinctive fashion.
Organized as both military units and social clubs, the Tanner groups had military and civil departments to deal with the preparation and organization of the parades, and the tasks of administration and fundraising for the rallies and speakers, respectively.
Frederick Douglass
Club names reflected both military jargon and, in small towns, the name of the municipality. In the bigger cities, other self-selecting groups emerged, reflecting country of origin, job titles, and interests. “Colored” Tanner companies sprang up in towns large and small, and held special events with particular relevance to their apparent change in status due to the outcome of the war. In a special dispatch to The Chicago Tribune on September 21, 1868, it was announced that “The colored people of Springfield will celebrate the anniversary of the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to-morrow. A company of colored Tanners will be in attendance from Jacksonville. Hon. S.M. Cullom, General John M. Palmer, Fred. Douglass, General McClernand, and Hon. B.T. Edwards and others have received invitations to be present and address them. Fred. Douglass has already arrived and will positively deliver an address upon this occasion.” What an interesting event that must have been, with Frederick Douglass, the national leader of the abolitionist movement, mixing it up with prominent war heroes, politicians and elected officials (Cullom and Palmer both would go on to become governors of Illinois).
I suspect it is safe to say that the torchlight parades of the era were the most exciting and colorful events of city life. Years before the invention of the incandescent bulb by Edison, thousands of torches lit up the night sky, and the smell of kerosene came to permeate everyone’s hair and clothing. [Maybe that’s why we don’t have nighttime parades anymore.]
Illustration from Harper’s Weekly, “Grand Procession of the Wide Awakes at New York on the Evening of October 3, 1860.” Graphic, reproduced for use in “American Democracy: The Great Leap of Faith” exhibition at National Museum of American History.
Even small communities had city brass bands, cornet bands, military bands, and fife and drum corps to play patriotic music, as thousands of marchers sang along; “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching” and “Rally Round the Flag” filled the air. Battalion and regiment-sized groups had their own glee clubs that took special positions in the parades.
Major parades included many wagons, decked out like today’s “floats,” cavalcades of horsemen (including “lady equestriennes”), and long lines of private carriages and farm wagons carrying partisan supporters and festooned with flags and mottos. Goff reports that “Calvary troops were used as honor guard escorts for visiting celebrities. Cavalrymen tended to be an elite Tanner unit, since they almost invariably were mounted on fine horses and showed a drill proficiency which clearly marked them as veteran Union Army cavalrymen.” Men and wagons carried three or more-sided wooden boxes covered with cheesecloth or paper, called transparencies, containing torches and painted with political slogans or pictures of the candidates, some by nationally famous caricaturists, like Thomas Nast.[11]
Abraham Lincoln campaign parade transparency. PL*238747.01.
Residents and supporters thronged the parade routes, singing along, cheering, and setting off often thousands of fireworks, including sky rockets, Roman candles, and Bengal lights—a kind of firework giving off an intense blue flame and used for lighting or signaling—and lighting up “illuminations”—headlights borrowed from locomotives—Chinese lanterns, and candles and torches in the windows and on the street fronts of buildings. Bonfires, built on the unpaved streets, were used to mark parade routes and intersections. And at the end, after the invited politicians and orators had been heard, often for several hours at a time, all retired to “a fine supper” provided by the local ladies auxiliary of the correct political persuasion.
All this came to a head on Thursday evening, November 5, 1868, when the Chicago Tanners held a final parade to celebrate a Republican victory and the election of Grant and Colfax. Fred Richter was there.
Tanners Company B Meets For the Last Grand Parade
THE FINALE. How the Great Victory was Celebrated Last Evening. The Garden City in a Blaze of Glory. Loyal Men and Women Wild with Excitement. The Greatest Demonstration Ever Witnessed in the West. The Tanners in Procession 20,000 Strong. Thus proclaimed the front page of the Chicago Tribune on November 6th, the day after Grant and Colfax won. Originally scheduled for October 31st, but postponed due to inclement weather, this “last Grand Parade” was witnessed by over 200,00 people. The Tribune provided multi-page coverage to the spectacle and seemed fully and ecstatically vindicated for backing the right horse.
After the heat and toil of a bitterly contested and fairly won election; after the enemy has been utterly routed, and there are no more battles left to be fought, no more triumphs to be won in the present, the members of the Grand Republican Army, to whom the county owes so much, avail themselves of their undoubted right and celebrate in every way, with music and torches, their brilliant successes of Thursday last, when all their labors were crowned with success and everywhere constant fortune smiled upon them.
After a victory, too, is the proper time, and certainly the safe time, for exultation and rejoicing….[12]
While most of the Tribune’s article was devoted to a detailed description of the parade and its participants, it’s author took a few good shots at the political opposition, as well.
These Tanners who marched in procession last night, acting in concert with the civilian members of the Republican party, accomplished all that they desired, and a little more. So it is only natural that they should crow a little over the Democrats, even though they lay themselves open to the charge of treating poor dumb brutes in an unfeeling manner. But yet, the Democracy have bragged so much and done so little, have wasted so many words and so much money, and polled so few votes that we cannot help laughing at them, even at the very moment that one pities most their forlorn condition.
Surely Richter, if he was there, looked back on this time as one of the most exciting of his life.
Preview: The Germans are Coming Part 4.
Fred Richter abandons Chicago to speculate unsuccessfully on real estate in Blair City, Iowa. Richter responds to Governor Salomon’s call and, joined by Joseph Klee, travels to the PNW in search of fame and fortune. Richter and Klee relieve August Wolff of his disappointing investment, become land owners and farmers in the Nisqually Valley.
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[1]Chicago Photographers 1847 through 1900, as listed in Chicago City Directories. Chicago Historical Society, North Avenue at Clark Street, Print Department, 1958.
[2] However, the oldest meaning of this word was simply “laborer,” or “person who works with his hands,” from the Greek root, mekhanikos. Yet another usage defines “mechanic” as an artisan, skilled tradesperson, or technician who uses tools to build, maintain, or repair machinery.
[3] No relation to Lloyds of London, the insurance and reinsurance market. “Lloyd” was used as a term for a shipping company in the mid-19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norddeutscher_Lloyd (accessed 6/4/2021).
[6] Thanks for much of what follows to Charles D. Goff and his paper, “Torchlight Soldiers: A Wisconsin View of the Torchlight Parades of the Republican Party ‘Tanners’ and the Democratic Party ‘White Boys in Blue.’” In Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 1978, Vol 66, pp. 206-234.
[7] Copperheadism refers to a faction of the Union Democrats that opposed the Civil War and favored peaceful settlement with the South, during the war, and a return to pre-war conditions, including slavery, afterwards.
[8]The Evening Post, Chicago, August 28, 1868. “A Rebel Outrage: Murderous Attack on a Republican Meeting—’White Boys in Blue’ Break Up an Assembly of Tanners.”
[9] The Freedmen’s Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing and medical aid, established schools and offered legal assistance. It also attempted to settle former slaves on land confiscated or abandoned during the war. However, the bureau was prevented from fully carrying out its programs due to a shortage of funds and personnel, along with the politics of race and Reconstruction. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedmens-bureau Accessed 6/30/2021.
[11] Caricaturist and editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly at the time, Thomas Nast is credited with the creation of the modern version of Santa Claus and the political symbol of the elephant for the Republican Party (GOP).
Just a reminder that the pages of this blog consist of an overflow, an excess of information I garnered while researching the life and times of the Braget family, owners of a farm on the east bank of the Nisqually River in the South Puget Sound region of Washington State from 1896-2002. In addition to the first inhabitants, the Nisqually, Puyallup, and Steh-Chass, many interesting people inhabited the Nisqually Valley as newcomers. While often referred to as pioneers, these folk more immediately were immigrants, usually youngsters, bringing with them their styles of life, visions, prejudices, and dreams from some other region of the country or world. Some left sizeable footprints, others a bare scrape in the historical dust, but all are worthy of our remembrance.
As I go, I am using the much expanded coverage of the internet to flesh out the material I first started gathering twenty years ago, and of course I am making many discoveries in the process, in some cases most startling and exciting ones. In many instances the new finds come as the result of wonderful old records and biographies that have been put online since (and therefore made available to my very own desk); in others, the digitization of databases such as those available through Ancestry and Find-A-Grave, for example, has made an amazing amount of new information about families and the links between them available. All of it, of course, must be taken with a grain of salt, for it represents someone’s memories, or memories of memories.
But let’s get on with our stories of the immigration of young Germans to the Nisqually.
More than a million and a half Germans immigrated to the U.S. between 1850 and 1869, part of an excess of five million that did so before the end of the century. At times one in every three recent immigrants in the country was from Bavaria, or Prussia, or Saxony, or another of the 41 states of the Holy Roman Empire that had become semi-independent in the mid-seventeenth century and would only become unified under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with the formation of the German Empire in 1871.
The twenty-five or so years that led up to German unification were marked by foment, radical change, and increasing religious persecution. Revolutionary fever swept the region in 1848-49, as the liberal middle-class teamed with a labor class radicalized by a desire for improvements to working and living conditions, only to break upon the resistance of a strong, conservative aristocracy. Meanwhile, crop failures, draconian inheritance laws, a high cost of living and the growing impact of the Industrial Revolution led to widespread suffering and poverty. Some people, such as well-known liberals, were forced to leave to escape persecution, and became known as Forty-Eighters. Others, whose skills and class allowed them to, chose to emigrate in search of a more promising future.
German immigrants spread out all over the East Coast and Midwest of the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, but a considerable number of them ended up looking for jobs and opportunities in Chicago. There they met Edward S. Salomon, the man who arguably had the greatest impact on continuation of German immigration west to the southern Puget Sound region.
Edward Selig Salomon was born on Christmas Day, 1836, into the Jewish aristocracy of the duchy of Schleswig, then part of Denmark. He attended university in the town of Schleswig before immigrating to America as a seventeen year-old, in 1853, where he quickly made his way to Chicago. Salomon eventually took up the study of law, was admitted to the bar in 1859 and, at age 24, was elected to the Chicago city council as alderman to the Sixth Ward only a year later.
The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 interrupted Salomon’s promising political career, but at the same time it brought him notoriety for bravery, skill in battle, and strategic expertise that was to stand him in good stead in the postwar years. Edward enlisted on May 6, 1861, joining Company H, Twenty-Fourth Illinois Infantry, under Colonel Frederick Hecker, another German lawyer whose radical championship of popular rights and participation in the failed revolution of 1848 had driven him from his home in Baden. Salomon quickly rose to the rank of captain in the 24th, but when Hecker resigned his commission following a disagreement with his officers, Edward followed him and helped form a new regiment, the 82nd Illinois, which came to be composed mainly of German, Jewish, Swedish and other European volunteers. Company C of the 82nd consisted entirely of Jews who had been equipped and armed by the Chicago community.
Edward S. Salomon
Now a lieutenant colonel, Edward became the quintessential Civil War hero, and was reported to have two horses shot out from under him, just at Gettysburg. Salomon and the 82nd exemplified the backbone of the Union Army, serving at most of the major battles from 1863-65, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, New Hope Church, Peachtree Creek, the siege and occupation of Atlanta, and Sherman’s March to the Sea. Salomon concluded the war as a brigadier general, with commendations for bravery and excellence as an officer, all by the age of twenty-nine.
The 82nd Illinois Infantry
Back in Chicago, Edward received a hero’s welcome, especially from the so-called Radical Republicans. During and after the Civil War the Republican Party underwent several upheavals, one of the most intense of which occurred when pro-Lincoln members decamped, in 1864, to create the National Union Party. Those left behind, the “Radical Republicans,” were fiercely abolitionist and anti-slavery (as were most German immigrants), felt that the Southern states should be dealt with severely both during and after the war, and opposed Lincoln’s leniency. When Grant emerged as the Radicals’ presidential candidate in 1868, Salomon came to stand out among those in Chicago who organized political clubs to support the “Galena Tanner,” a nickname Grant apparently chose to reflect his humble beginnings as a leather merchant in a small Illinois town. [More about his “Tanners Clubs” will follow in a later post.]
Ninth Territorial Governor, Edward S. Salomon
In the first year of his presidency, Grant provided jobs for his friends, among them General Salomon, who he rewarded for outstanding military service and for an ability to turn out the vote in Chicago with an appointment as governor of Washington Territory in early 1870, succeeding the 8th governor, Alvan Flanders.
Now let us leave Gov. Salomon for a moment, and meet the first of the three young German men that are known to have owned land, which would eventually become part of the dairy farm owned by the Braget family, in the Nisqually Valley.
August Charles Wolff
Little is known about the life of August Charles Wolff before he appeared in the 1870 census for Olympia, the territorial capital of Washington state. The census taker recorded that he had been born about 1848, in Mecklenburg in the north of Germany, and that his profession was that of “upholsterer.” The census shows 22 year-old August living at an address owned by George Farmer, perhaps a boarding house that attracted Germanic immigrants, for also listed at the address were William Sternberg, a furrier from Hanover, a city in northern Germany not far from Bremen, and Adam Yost, from Hessen, both in their mid-40s. Of the three boarders, only William Sternberg seems to have left a lasting impression on the town: a house and old waterwheel that survived on East Union Street for some time. However, thanks to Georgiana Mitchell Blankenship, Sternberg’s story is known in detail and provides wonderful clues about the lives of our young Nisqually Germans. For, as recorded in Mrs. Blankenship’s volume, Tillicum Tales of Thurston County,[i] Mr. Sternberg was a friend of Governor Salomon.
Like so many other German immigrants, John Henry William Sternberg made his way to Chicago, where he became a success at his chosen trade as an expert in furs. Somewhere along the line he met Salomon who, when appointed territorial governor, convinced Sternberg to follow him to Washington to pursue the fur-trading business there. Sternberg must have done so with alacrity (leaving wife and four children behind in Chicago), accounting for his presence at Farmer’s boarding house in mid-1870, just months after Salomon’s appointment. As Mrs. Blankenship put it,
With visions of wealth and rapidly acquired fortune to be gained in the West through bartering with the Indians for the furs of wild animals which were so plentiful before the march of civilization drove them to the remote parts of the mountains, Sternberg accepted Salomon’s offer.
(There’s a lot to unpack there, but that’s for another time.)
I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that Salomon and Sternberg accounted for Wolff’s presence at the boardinghouse, as well.
Then, sometime later, Gov. Salomon, realizing “that the vast resources of this country imperatively demanded more men and women to develop them and subdue the wilderness,” and perhaps now missing his wife who had also remained behind in the Windy City, convinced Sternberg to return to Chicago to gather up a “colony” of immigrants. This he did, and soon a party of forty-some families, including the Mmes. Salomon and Sternberg, were travelling by rail to Oakland, California, where they embarked on the steamer Idaho for Steilacoom. There,
the majority of them remained at the military post at that place. Governor Salomon had made arrangements for their support, until the men could locate on homesteads. In addition to this encouragement, the homeseekers were supplied with teams, farming implements and supplies, payment to be made out of the crops as the settlers were able.
We don’t know when August Wolff left home in Mecklenburg, but it is a fair bet that he learned his trade in the manufacture of furniture there and that he succumbed to the blandishments of the City of Bremen’s advertising campaign touting the benefits of immigration to the New World and took ship from the northern port of Bremerhaven. We do know that by 1870 he was in Olympia, living cheek-by-jowl with Sternberg, and that one year later he had the wherewithal, $450, to buy 100 acres on the edge of the river in the Nisqually Valley from Warren and Hepsibah Gove (see my blog post The Germans are Coming, Part 1).
At this point it is anyone’s guess whether August was one of the beneficiaries of Governor Salomon’s largess or perhaps assembled his own grubstake from employment in a professional capacity, as an upholsterer, in Olympia. In any case, on July 26, 1873, August wrote to his friend, Friedrich Richter, on the letterhead of J. C. Horr, “Manufacturer, Importer, Wholesale and Retail Dealer in Furniture, Bedding, Carpets, Picture Frames, Brackets, Toilet Sets, Vases, and All Furnishing Goods.”
J. C. Horr
Because we can, let’s spend a little time with Mr. Horr’s story here. His life, thankfully presented in detail in his obituary in the Morning Olympian on March 11, 1899, stands in stark contrast to what we know of the young Germans’, and is a good example of how interesting and varied were the comings and goings of many of Olympia’s early citizens.
In 1872 forty-year-old James Cortlandt Horr (“J.C.”) was as new to Olympia as Wolff. By this time, the town faced an uncertain financial future. A real estate boom had been spurred by the possibility that it might become the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, connecting the branch that in 1870 the NPR had begun building north at Kalama, Washington, approximately 40 miles north of the Columbia River, with the line stretching west from the Midwest. But Olympia faced intense competition from Steilacoom, Tacoma, Mukilteo and Seattle, and the town fathers were nervous. Then on Dec. 14, 1872, the city was severely shaken by an earthquake. The fact that “chimneys cracked in Olympia, trees toppled in Puyallup and fissures split the ground south of Seattle led early observers to assume the quake was centered under Puget Sound. But windows also shattered as far away as Victoria, B.C., and people were knocked off their feet at Snoqualmie Pass. The first analysis of newspaper reports from the time put the epicenter not far from Vancouver, B.C. The most compelling eyewitness accounts, though, trickled in from east of the Cascades, in the sparsely populated hills near Wenatchee.” It was what proved to be the largest earthquake ever to strike eastern Washington.[ii]
Nonetheless, Olympia at this time was a desirable place to be, as Gordon Newell has pointed out:
Olympia, at this critical period in its history, was still the largest settlement in Washington territory and, despite its miles of mudflats at low tide, the most attractive. As streets were laid out in the 1850’s and 60’s, maple trees were planted to shade the wooden sidewalks, and by the 1870’s these shade trees were the town’s greatest visual asset, giving it the appearance of a carefully tended New England village and sparing it from the raw and temporary look of most frontier towns.[iii]
Considering Horr’s later success as a businessman and political figure in the South Sound region, his beginnings were not particularly auspicious. Born in 1834 of decidedly English stock, James began his westward migration when he was only two by moving with his parents and four brothers from Vermont to Ohio; he “left home at the age of 10 years and from that time earned his own support,” according to the Morning Olympian, but somehow managed to attend Oberlin College “for a time.” As a nineteen year old he acquired miner’s fever and became one of some 18,000 Americans who responded to the gold rushes of the early 1850s in Australia, whose population tripled by 1860 and became relatively more cosmopolitan, due to the influx of Euro-Americans looking to get rich. In his 12 years down under, James spent more time learning and then managing the overland stage transportation business than in the mines; his company, The Cobb and Co Telegraph Line of Royal Mail Coaches out of Victoria, was purported to be the largest stage line in the world.[iv]
James also found a wife in Australia, Eliza Upton, a lass from County Limerick, and they had a daughter, Pearl, who did not survive childhood. The Horrs left Australia for the States about 1865, first moving to Ohio, where with a brother, James operated purportedly the largest cheese factory in the state, and then, finding the weather disagreeable there, continuing on to California’s Santa Cruz County, where they tried ranching. Finally, in 1872, the Horrs found Washington Territory and Olympia.
By this time it seems as though James was willing to try his hand at anything, and/or may have been good at everything. Not content with the furniture store where August Wolff found work, James got himself appointed a special agent of the U.S. Treasury Department by Secretary John Sherman (brother to General William Tecumseh Sherman) the year of the move to Olympia, a position that eventually gave him responsibility for a district that included the state of Oregon and the Washington and Alaska territories. Thirteen years later he was removed from the job during the brief (and tragic) Garfield Administration and the political upheaval that ensued.
In 1876 Horr was elected both mayor of Olympia and a member of the territorial government, where he served in the third and fourth legislatures, according to his obituary. Apparently never one to rest on his laurels, James also went into the grain and feed and real estate businesses somewhere along the line and “later handled hundreds of tons of oysters yearly,” probably the tiny Olympias on their way to becoming Hangtown Fry in San Francisco and other west coast towns.[v]
In 1891, six years after being forcibly retired from his position with Treasury, Horr was re-elected mayor of Olympia, and a year later returned to the legislature as a state senator from Thurston County. Politically he was a “staunch republican,” and was known as an indefatigable (no kidding!) booster of Olympia’s growth and prosperity. He was a Mason (just about everybody seemed to be back then), and a member of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (AOUW), an organization that had been created at the end of the Civil War to provide mutual social and financial support. The AOUW was the first of the fraternal benefit societies that would offer insurance as well as sickness, accident, death and burial policies to its members. Horr was also a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE), which modelled itself on the Masons.[vi]
At age 67, James Cortlandt Horr finally came to rest, quietly, about three am on March 11, 1899, due to blood poisoning as the result of “an aggravated attack of erysipelas.” Not a common condition today and called St. Anthony’s Fire in the Middle Ages, erysipelas is a bacterial infection of the skin that results in a fiery red rash. The cure, penicillin, would not come along for another 30 years. Horr’s funeral took place the next day at the Masonic Temple on Eighth and Main streets in Olympia. He was buried at the Masonic cemetery in Tumwater. Elizabeth, his wife, survived him by ten years.
Back to August Wolff (I promise)
Wolff’s employ with Horr, and in fact his presence in the South Sound region, was not to last. He only held on to the land in Nisqually, the 100-acre Gove parcel, for three years before selling it to Richter and Klee, without making any profit, in 1874. One wonders whether the awarding of the western terminus of the railroad by the NPR to Tacoma in July, 1873, may have had something to do with his departure. On the one hand, a case certainly could have been made for a branch of the railroad north and east out of Olympia, had it been made the terminus, coming straight through the Nisqually Valley (one later did, though not from Olympia) and increasing the value of Wolff’s investment many-fold. On the other, there is no indication that Wolff wanted to work the land himself. In fact, August’s letter to Richter mentions that he hired others to cut the marsh grass growing along the mudflats of his land for sale as hay to the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. The lands of the PSAC, an offshoot of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and its flocks and herds spread out on the prairie north and east of the Nisqually River for miles.[vii] Marsh grass, which had been feed for PSAC stock for years, would next provide income to both Richter and Klee, but would also be the cause of Herr Richter’s downfall, as we shall see.
Puget Sound Agriculture Company Land Claim
August Wolff next appears in the record as a thirty-two year-old married man with wife Louise and two children, a son, August Jr., age three, and a daughter, Muriel, a toddler, living on Cherry Street in Seattle in 1880. The census still listed him as an upholsterer, but August went on to careers as a soda maker, bottler, and, finally, a candy maker with the new Pacific Coast Biscuit Company, located on Occidental Street, near Jackson, in Seattle.[viii] He died at age 61 in 1909 and was buried by his family and the fraternal benefit society he had shared with Horr, the Ancient Order of United Workmen.
Preview: The Germans are Coming, Part 3
Fred Richter finds Chicago after failing at his own attempt to get rich quick in Iowa. The evolution of Chicago politics (and social life), from the Know Nothings and the Wide-Awakes, to the Tanners.
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[i] Early History of Thurston County, Washington Together with Biographies and Reminiscences of Those Identified with Pioneer Days, Mrs. George Blankenship, ed., Olympia, Washington 1914.
[iv] Cobb & Co was set up in Melbourne, Victoria in 1853 by a small group of immigrant Americans and originally was called the American Telegraph Line of Coaches. Established with the intention of servicing the Victorian goldfields, the company quickly became the most successful one of its kind during the nineteenth century, pioneering transport routes, delivering mail, gold, and passengers throughout the country, and contributing greatly to social growth and the expansion of settlement across Australia. (https://www.cobbandco.net.au/about/when-cobb-co-was-king; accessed 4/25/2021)
[v] “Hangtown Fry could possibly be the first California cuisine. It consists of fried breaded oysters, eggs, and fried bacon, cooked together like an omelet. In the gold-mining camps of the late 1800s, Hangtown Fry was a one-skillet meal for hungry miners who struck it rich and had plenty of gold to spend.” (https://whatscookingamerica.net/History/HangtownFryHistory.htm, accessed 4/28/2021)
[vi] Both the AOUW and the BPOE, which began as a social club for minstrel show performers in New York City, were for whites only.
[vii] The formation of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company in 1838 ranks, with the U.S. government’s passage of donation land claim laws in the 1850s, among the most significant events in establishing the Puget Sound region as a destination for immigrants. The success of the Agricultural Company in using the landscape to raise cattle, sheep and crops was proof to the newcomers, most of whom were farmers, that the region was a suitable place to start a new life. Students of Hudson’s Bay Company history are in general agreement that the Puget Sound Agricultural Company was formed for two reasons: to try to strengthen British claims to lands north of the Columbia, and to expand the profitability of the mother company, the HBC.
[viii] Formed to compete with the National Biscuit Company (later Nabisco), the Pacific Coast Biscuit Company included seven companies that together controlled most of the commercial biscuit and cracker business west of the Rockies.
In May, 1880, Fred Richter fell off the scow that he was poling back across the Nisqually River towards his cabin on the east bank. He probably drowned immediately, though his body was not recovered from the swift-moving river by his neighbors until July.
Who was Richter, and why did he fall off the boat? Well, the second question is easily set aside: we don’t know and never will. Local historian Del McBride thought perhaps he had partied a little too hard, after using the scow to return a mower that he had borrowed to its owner across the river. However, that was only conjecture (and, if we are not careful, the beginning of a pseudo-memory!).
But Richter’s identity, and the usually-associated questions about where he came from and what he was doing in the Valley (and, as we shall see, how many handkerchiefs he possessed at the time of his death, all are within our grasp, thanks in large part to Daniel Mounts and his descendants. (Have patience, I’ll explain the several mysteries in that sentence in later posts.)
For us, blessed with an ability to see connections and cause and effect provided by historical perspective, the beginning of the answer to “Who was Friedrich Theodore Richter?” (for that was his given name) must begin with Warren Gove and his lyrically-named wife, Hepsibah Crocker Gove.
A full and proper treatment of the Goves, as well-known, community-minded pioneers, first of Steilacoom and Ketron Island and then the Nisqually Valley, will come at another time. For our purposes now, two things about them will suffice.
The first is that both Warren and Hepsibah traced their family lines back to the early Plymouth Colony, and themselves were from the portion of Massachusetts that became southern Maine during their lifetimes. As such, they represented a link between cultures—the comparatively well-educated, traditional and perhaps somewhat fusty life of New England; the young, rough and lively tempo of the American western frontier; and the young Germans, many of them from Prussia, that were beginning to make the South Puget Sound region their home. Like the region in general, the Nisqually Valley was a melting pot of races, ethnicities and cultures.
Second, the Goves, along with their neighbors, the Mountses and others, were among those who had an opportunity to get to know the wrath of the Nisqually River at full flood, an experience that caused them to sell their land in the valley and return to the relative safety of urban life, in Steilacoom. We know this because Christina Mounts, Daniel and Catherine’s oldest child, was there, an eye witness, albeit only five years old at the time. Seventy-five years later, the events, as dictated to her grandson, historian Delbert McBride, were still clear in her mind.
The Daniel and Catherine Mounts family, including Catherine’s father, John McLeod, ca. 1894. Christina is the adult, fourth from the right, with a child on her lap.
It was the winter of 1867-1868. Christina remembered two months of steady rain, followed by a December freeze and then a sudden thaw, as a warm dry wind from the south swept the land in the early part of January. Three more days of solid rain in mid-January, and the river started to rise. Christina’s father had gone for the mail in Steilacoom, earlier in the day, leaving his family at their home by the Nisqually River. Then the big trees started coming down the river:
There were huge fir trees and cedars hung up in log jams. The river was not yet over its banks, so the swirling water was cutting away the rich soil very rapidly. Pigs and cattle were marooned in the fields; some pigs on the wide, flat tree stumps there were squealing in fright. At the Shazer farm across the river[1], they gathered their flock of sheep onto a scow to keep them from drowning.
Evening brought the crest, and then, just as Daniel arrived home, the river overflowed its banks. He and neighbor Warren Gove conferred, knowing what might come.
They had both heard the old Nisqually Indians tell of the river suddenly cutting away its banks and changing its course from one side of the valley to the other. Many Indians were alive who had seen the Nisqually change its course completely overnight—some said because of a beaver tooth charm buried where someone wanted the course of the river to go. Little bridge upriver went out—the logs piled up against it and it suddenly gave way, all knocked to pieces.
The Gove’s house was close to the bridge, which Warren had built. Fearing that their home would go into the river, the family packed up a few necessary things and left to take refuge in the house of a neighbor, Philander Washburn, on higher ground.[2] The men left the women and children there, to try to save what they could from the house by the river. Meanwhile the Mounts women watched in consternation as the water rose around them, filling the kitchen to three or four inches. A bit later Daniel’s brother Thomas arrived and escorted Christina and her pregnant mother to safety; at times the refugees had to swim their horses across deep gullies cut by the raging waters. Huge trees roared past in the still rising river.
We reached the safety of Mr. Washburn’s place, after our adventures, and that night slept on pallets on his cabin floor. It was a cabin full, with Mrs. Gove, her daughters, Alice, Fannie and Clara, Mother, myself and Gus Kautz, the General’s young son by his Indian wife.[3] The men slept in the Washburn barn loft.
We stayed at Washburn’s place for two nights, while the water receded. When we came back to our home on the river, the whole place looked so different it was hard to recognize it. All the big cottonwood trees between the house and the river had been swept away, and the milk house was filled with three or four feet of silt, and was never useable again. The shed part of the barn had collapsed, the cleared fields had piles of driftwood ten feet high.
The ’68 flood changed the course of the Nisqually River and of the lives of the Mounts and Gove families as well. Daniel Mounts vowed never to spend another winter in the Nisqually floodplain, and by the following fall had moved his family into a new, clapboard house on higher ground. The Goves lasted a couple more years, but by 1871 they had sold their Nisqually bottom land, which they had purchased only six years before, and moved back to Steilacoom. The new owner of the land was the first of our five Prussians, August Charles Wolff.
Preview: The Germans are Coming, Part 2
The coming, and swift going, of August Wolff, first of five Germans to own the Nisqually land. Friedrich Richter and his friend and countryman, Joseph Klee, arrive in the New World.
[1] A veteran of Indian wars (the so-called Black Hawk War of 1832, in what is now Illinois and Wisconsin, serving under General Winfield Scott, and the Puget Sound Indian War of 1855-56) and signer of the Medicine Creek Treaty, George Washington Shazer (or Shaser), with his wife, Margaret Packwood, and 14 children amassed about 1,000 acres of land on the west side of the Nisqually River delta. Their farm is the current site of the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.
[2] According to H.K. Hines, after seven years in the California gold fields, Philander S. Washburn arrived in Olympia “alone and afoot, carrying his blankets” in the spring of 1858. He settled on a claim of 320 acres in the Nisqually Valley, but in 1871 moved to the area which eventually became the town of Gate, on the Black River. After the death of his wife, Mary Jane McAllister (widow of John Wesley McAllister), Washburn returned to the Nisqually Valley and his “best friend,” Daniel Mounts, spending his remaining years on the Mounts’s farm.
[3] August Valentine Kautz, a German immigrant, was a professional soldier who served at Fort Steilacoom during the Indian wars of the 1850s. During the Nisqually leader’s trials for murder after the war, Kautz advocated for the release of Leschi, his relation by marriage to a Nisqually woman, Kitty. Kautz later left his Nisqually family to fight in the Civil War and eventually married a white woman and started another family.
In my introduction to Historical Musings I described history as memories, most often memories of memories. So-and-so remembers hearing from their grandmother that she heard that her great-grandfather had committed Such-and-such an act in the year 18xx, and of course So-and-so’s grandmother thinks she read about it in the family bible which, unfortunately, washed away in a flood in the year 19yy…
It is an axiom of professional historians that every factoid must be gleaned from three independent sources for it to lose its wanna-be status and become accepted fact. Or perhaps at least it used to be, before everything—fact and fiction—was committed to the Internet, most of the time without source attribution. Since then source independence has gained the status of an oxymoron.
But as you go back to the day, in the history of the Pacific Northwest, when mail was carried by snail (or canoe) and people used to actually write things down and look each other in the eye when they talked to one another, the sources of stories were a little more obvious and/or verifiable. Add in a soupçon of contemporary, working historians and you may find some of the “realest” facts available to us. At least, in their reporting, you can usually judge how old the information is, and thus how many memories it may have gone through; whether the account is an eyewitness one; and how likely it is that the writers may be describing something they heard from each other. I am of course referring to many of the “giants” of the era and locale, including William P. Bonney, Edward Huggins, Elwood Evans, Thomas W. Prosch, Herbert Hunt, H.K. Hines, William Fraser Tolmie, and the like.
Then there were the letter-writers and journal-keepers of the time, people like Joseph Heath, a Hudson’s Bay Company employee who farmed the Nisqually plain for four years and recorded his daily activities and trials in detail.[1] There were Nisqually Valley pioneer Daniel Mounts and his sons, who assiduously kept and preserved daily records of their labors, their businesses, and their family tribulations for later generations. Joel Myers, who filed a donation land claim[2] for the Nisqually land that later would belong to the Mounts family, and after them, the Bragets, kept a ledger of his daily business as a buyer and seller of goods and services (including loaning of the wherewithal) that listed the names of his clients, white and Indian, and, in many cases their hat and shoe sizes. So many of those names went unrecorded anywhere else.[3]
Joseph Heath
And finally there were the latter-day historians, who reached back in time through oral histories of their aging relatives to lay their memories out for other family members and the world at large. People who researched and preserved their family histories, like Delbert and Albert (Bud) McBride, descendants of the Mounts clan headed by Illinoian Daniel and his half-Indian, half-Scots wife, Catherine. Del’s interviews of his Aunt Ruby, Daniel’s granddaughter who knew her grandfather for twelve years and Catherine for another twenty-nine, provide wonderful eye-witness accounts of multi-racial life on the biggest farm in the valley, late in the 19th Century. And with his partner, Richard Schneider, Bud McBride preserved Del’s work after his death and added to it a significant collection of family and regional artifacts from that time.
Finally, there are the records, the trove of names and numbers that was created at the time of the events: donation land claim files, filled out by the pioneers themselves; census lists; sales and tax receipts; birth and death notices (though not often available); legal documents; and newspaper accounts of those events significant enough to be judged as of public interest. Such accounts, of course, bring up the question of selective perception: what roles do an author’s biases—political, racial, social, religious—play in what is reported, and how?
These are the sources we have to work with—yes, memories and interpretations all, but ones much closer to the original, if you will, ones less contaminated by the passage of time and secondary revisions by later, more distant authors.
Let us use them to create new memories.
*******
Preview: The Germans are Coming, Part 1 A thirty-something immigrant from Prussia drowns in the Nisqually River. Why? Who was he? How did he get there? Read on…
[1] Heath took up residence at Nisqually one year before Michael T. Simmons, George Bush, James McAllister, and others defied Hudson’s Bay Company hegemony by establishing the first American settlement in the region, near the falls on the Deschutes River at “New Market” (now Tumwater). Spanning the years 1845-1849, a single volume of Heath’s diary was rescued from oblivion not once but twice, first in 1930 by a distant relative of Heath’s and then in the 1970s by local historian Lucille McDonald. It has been published as Memoirs of Nisqually (Ye Galleon Press, 1979). Heath died in 1849. Western State Hospital now occupies the site of his farm.
[2] With the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, the U.S. government offered free land in Oregon Territory, including all the area west of the Continental Divide and north of the 42nd parallel. Driven by the doctrine of manifest destiny, the DLC Act was one of several land-grab tools that the government employed to populate the west with Americans while at the same time divesting earlier inhabitants—the Native Americans and the British—from their holdings.
[3] The primary purpose of Myers’ ledger was to record his business transactions as he bought, sold and bartered produce, animals, provisions, implements and labor with his neighbors and with nearby merchants in Steilacoom and Olympia. But for the historian, it contains a wealth of information about his life and times. The ledger, which deserves a chapter of this blog all its own, resides in the collection of the Washington State Historical Society.
Greetings friends, fellow historians, and any and all that love to turn back the clock a bit to look at what folks have done, used to do, or perhaps wanted to do but couldn’t.
I am pretty sure that time travel to the past is a pretty universal fantasy of folks with good imaginations–being a fly on the wall for major events whose stories have come to us imperfectly as memories, usually memories of memories. Did Nero really fiddle while flames consumed the city? Just how seductive was Cleopatra? Did Hamilton and Burr really have a bromance?
Many of you, like me, have stood upon a spot where something “significant” is supposed to have happened 50, or 100, or 500 years ago, and wondered what it looked like back then, what the people there were doing and why, what the food tasted like, whether the air was fresher, how quiet it could have been. A form of nostalgia, for sure, but also a deep curiosity about life as it was then and, perhaps, how it came to be what it is now.
I recently completed a book about life on 410 acres of land on the banks of the Nisqually River in the South Puget Sound region of western Washington state called For the Good of the Order: The Braget Farm and Land Use in the Nisqually Valley. The Bragets, a family of Norwegian immigrants, loved and lived on their dairy farm there for 100 years before selling it to the Nisqually Indian Tribe, the original stewards of the land and the nearby salmon-bearing waters. I spent the better part of 20 years trying to become the fly on the wall in that story so that I could share it, and its importance to all of us, as I would come to know it. I hope I was successful in that.
Along the way I got to know a little about the lives of some of the many pioneers that lived on or near that land in the Nisqually Valley before the Bragets acquired it in 1896. They were a diverse and multi-ethnic bunch, hailing from New and old England, Ireland, France, Prussia, and the Midwest and southeastern Atlantic states. The reasons that brought them to the Nisqually Valley were also diverse, but as far as I can tell these men, women and children all came in search of new lives and improved circumstances. Some found these things, and they and their descendants stayed. Others suffered and left, or died in the trying, and left no trace other than the memories of their contemporaries who, thankfully, committed them to print.
My posts, as they follow, will share what I have learned about those pioneer families, their impact on our lives, and, perhaps a few questions that their existences have raised. For the most part, these posts will be based on the writings of others, past and present, who knew or know something of these people. But please remember, all history is memory, and by necessity, memory is selective, often discarding the parts that are painful, repetitive, boring, or apparently irrelevant at the time. And, as any self-respecting wall fly will tell you, the devil (and so much more) is in the details!
Historical Musings by Tim Ransom 