Mary Jean wrote once about this
logging camp, in an historical journal.
She notes that she was raised in Chicago, and came to the camp as a
married woman, a city girl cavorting out in the wilderness. She is virginly dressed in a white suit and
white pointy toed shoes when she arrives in Shelton and is headed into the
wilderness to live in a logging camp.
Her story has this King of Siam-ish feel – a young, smartly dressed,
well-educated woman arrives in a frontier town bringing with her all the
comforts of home. Her fantasy of what
life would be like include a log cabin with a window box of geraniums. She awakens that first morning to a much
different reality: breakfast, then a
large greasy black locomotive that pulls into the middle of town belching
smoke. A soot-blackened man yells down
at her from atop the locomotive whether she is Bill’s wife? When she says ‘yes’ he reaches a greasy arm
down to help her aboard, and will deliver her to her husband. She rides what’s known as a “Crummy” out
private train tracks into the woods. After
trials and tribulations aboard the Crummy, and after she has to traverse train
trestles in white pointy high heels, she sees an old guy with a shaved head coming
toward her. Alas, this is her
husband. A guy she reportedly hadn’t
seen since the wedding the previous year. You can feel the disappointment she feels
towards him. The romance ends abruptly
when he hands her a bucket when she asks for a drink of water, and points her towards
some wild stream surrounded by sucking mud.
This is her new lot in life and she has fallen quite a ways from her big
city upbringing.
There is no doubt that life in a
logging camp was brutal. First, those
early logging operations were not only primitive, but downright dangerous. The numbers of injuries and deaths in those
early operations were enormous. And,
depending on the severity of the injury, survival was not always the best
option. Logging happens in the roughest
terrains, in the worst weather, in remote places. The communication systems in the forests were
primitive. One of those large trees
coming down could kill several people if they were standing in the wrong spots,
and moving cylindrical logs rolling around in the forest could wreak havoc as
well.
Young men started out their
careers in the woods as whistlepunks, including Grandpa Stevenson. What was a whistlepunk? As far as I can tell, they were the
communicators or conductors of the symphony of logging in the woods. Here’s a description of their job duties from
the book They Tried to Cut it All:
The
whistlepunk operated a simple but ingenious apparatus. It consisted of a long wire stretched from
the donkey engine out to where the rigging slingers worked. The wire was slung from hemlock saplings,
high-butted stumps, old snags and eventually wound up at the spring poles
projecting above the donkey roof. A
quick jerk or blow on the wire was carried from the spring poles to the
whistle. The jerk drew a jet of steam
and a whistle to which the dunkey puncher was supposed to respond.
A good
whistlepunk could skin the mainline back to the woods, slack the main or the
haulback, go ahead slow or just put a strain on the line. Or, upon signal, he could start a thunderous
symphony of snorting engines and crashing timber. It was something to see.
In his
day, the whistlepunk was an important figure.
Upon his alertness depended the health and longevity of the men who
snared the logs. He had a carefully
prepared and carefully followed array of signals, all of which had to be
instantly given and instantly responded to.
There could be no delay or mistakes or the hooktender would come
storming out of the canyon with fire in his eyes and his tongue spurting
flames.
Dad was born into this business
in June 1925. It was part of his soul,
but only a part. He actually didn’t
enjoy the culture of logging much, and he chose to live and work as a cowboy
most of his life, and not a logger. But
he understood the woods and he appreciated the fruits of the forests and what
they did for the rest of society. He
reverted to logging when he needed to make some quick cash; otherwise, he
enjoyed the uncertainties of another frontier occupation: ranching.
And he chose to raise his family on a cattle ranch in Oregon, and not in
the woods of Washington State.
Figure 3
- Mary Jean, undated, as a child
Mary Jean leaves out some
interesting facts of her earlier life.
In order to understand Mary Jean you have to back up and understand her
mother, Goldie, and her father, William Stuart who was known as Will.
Will was a lawyer, but of the
shyster variety. He was famous for womanizing,
lying, cheating or bribing his way out of trouble. Goldie met and married him when she was 18
years old; they married in Phoenix Arizona in 1905; what Goldie did not know is
that Will had been married previously and had two children from his first
marriage. Hugh and Margarete were then
presented to Goldie to raise “as her own.”
Margarete was 8 years old; Hugh was then 5. A year later, Mary Jean was born in Phoenix –
but soon thereafter Will moves the family to Madison, Wisconsin where he is
practicing law.
Will dreams big about his future. He runs for the 5th congressional
District seat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1910 in a contentious campaign. He is running against Victor Berger, who
beats him, and becomes the first socialist in Congress. After Will’s political defeat, things start
to fall apart for him. Early in 1911 he
is arrested in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a young woman, and charged with
forgery. He fights extradition back to
Wisconsin, but to no avail. He goes on
trial in Madison and in April 1911 Will is convicted of forging a mining
officials name on some paperwork in a deal gone bad, and he is sent to
prison. From the Milwaukee paper, it
reports the following conversation in the courtroom upon his conviction:
Stuart: “The jury has rendered its verdict and I am
willing to abide by their decision. Only
for the sake of my family and my children I ask the leniency of the court.”
Assistant
DA: “where are your family?”
Stuart: “My children are at 375 Brady Street and my
wife is in the courtroom.”
Assistant
DA: “How about the woman you were arrested with
in Cincinnati?”
Stuart: “That is an absolute falsehood! Those detective in Cincinnati spread that
report to gain notoriety for themselves and to further their own nefarious
ends!” He continues “The picture of the
woman published in the newspapers there was a very dear friend of my wife and
myself. We had almost raised that girl,
and I want to say that if I have done wrong I want to be punished for it. They have robbed me of everything, my manhood,
my ambitions, my hopes, my wife, my children, but they cannot take from me the
consciousness I have in my own heart that I have done no wrong. Who is going to feed my wife and babies while
I am in prison?”
Assistant
DA: You should have thought of that before.
Assistant
DA turns to court: “While I
feel sorry for the family, Stuart was an attorney-at-law and should have known
better than to pass a forged instrument.
He is an officer of this court and as such his crime is doubly heinous
and I ask that an example be made of the case.
He knows what forgery means, he knows the significance of uttering and
for a man of his education to commit this is a disgrace to the entire legal
profession.”
The
Court: “Honesty and
integrity are the essential features of a lawyer. No matter how great the ability of an
attorney, if he is dishonest he is a menace to the community. No trust is greater no office is higher, and
the lawyer who betrays that trust, whoever violates the oath which he has so
solemnly given the court when he is admitted to the bar deserves severe censure
and punishment. Mr. Stuart, you are a
disgrace to the profession. I have a
profound respect of every member of the bar and you have violated the
confidence of the court, and of your brother members of the bar. Your name shall be stricken from the rolls of
this court and of all courts of record in this state. A committee of the bar association will be
formed and a copy of the testimony submitted to them.”
The newspaper article goes on to
talk about my great-grandmother Goldie.
“During the entire time in court….Mrs. Stuart sat with her eyes downcast
and not until sentence was pronounced did she raise them. As she did she encountered the gaze of her
husband; then he reeled and fell but she made no move. The deputies came and took the man from the
courtroom and into the corridor, but still she sat, as if she could not
comprehend what had happened. The judge
came down from his seat and the clerks began leaving the room, when suddenly
she stood up, turned and asked a deputy where she could find her husband. He told her and she went to him.”
Poor Goldie. This young woman married a shyster and
endured a lot from him; not the least of which raising two children she had no
forewarning about and then surviving as he was sent to prison for his
misdeeds.
The paper trail and reporting of
their life is sketchy from that point forward.
But we know that Will registered for WWI from a Chicago address, where
he lives with Goldie and the children at 5558 S Drexel Avenue which is in Hyde
Park near the University of Chicago.
Regardless of his prison term in Wisconsin, he is practicing law in
Chicago.
In 1919 Al Capone moves his
family to 7244 S Prairie Avenue in roughly the same neighborhood in Chicago. The only reason I bring this up is because
there was a rumor in our family that Will worked for Al Capone as his lawyer. Grandpa told me that Will, a shyster lawyer,
worked in some capacity for Al Capone, but betrayed the mobster by stealing
some money and had to flee town.
And indeed, the paper records
show that by January 1920 Will and his family moved to Tacoma. While practicing law in Washington, Will
managed to anger a client he was representing, and the client pulled out a gun
and shot him. It wasn’t a fatal wound;
and his client pleaded guilty to 2nd degree assault and was
sentenced to Walla Walla state penitentiary.
Sometimes between 1920 and 1924 Goldie has had enough and divorces Will.
Will is now on his own, first traveling to San Francisco. Goldie, on the other hand, has to survive. And she does it in one of the only ways women
had at that time to survive. She finds
another man, a butcher named Louis Strickland who lives in Seattle, and she
marries him as fast as she can.
Figure 4
- Will Stuart Passport Photo 1926
As for Will, the end of his
life is coming fast, but he doesn’t seem to know it. He travels like a guy with a lot of money, from
San Francisco to points further south, eventually taking a steamer ship from
New Orleans to Central America, traveling first to Honduras, San Salvadore,
Nicaragua and Guatemala. He lists his
occupation as “legal advisor” and says that he is traveling on business. He is gone for the year 1925, returning back
into the US in 1926, crossing the border in Louisiana and settling for a time
in Mineral Wells, Texas.
This is where family lore and
fact converge; the wonder of the internet brought me in contact with a distant
relation of ours (Will’s sister’s great-grand daughter) who reported to me that
she has an undertaker’s invoice and that a local newspaper obituary reads as
follows: “A Prominent Attorney Passes Away Here - The funeral
service of William A. Stuart, age 52 years who passed away here Friday
afternoon at a local hotel will be held Sunday" It declares that Will bled to death after a
tonsillectomy. However, our family lore, reported to me from Grandpa,
is that Al Capone caught up with him and had his throat ripped out. What is true and what isn’t – well, who knows. He lays in an unmarked grave at Elmwood
Cemetery in Mineral Wells, Texas, so, he’s not talking about it.
So Mary Jean was no debutante
showing up in the wilderness in 1923 to find her husband. She was under-educated (she was only 17 years
old) and I have no idea how she met Grandpa (he was 4 years older than she
was). She was a survivor with nowhere
else to go, with a father who was a bit of a rogue and a mother who needed to
find another man to support her. Mary
Jean’s fantasy many years later about her own life was that she was some
white-clad innocent arriving in an unknown destination, already married (for a
year!) to a man she met in college. The
truth was much less romantic: she was
broke, from a broken home, had probably had not graduated from high school and had
nowhere else to go and no one else to support her. She is a scruffy young thing, married to an
ambitious man (not unlike her own father?) with a young baby, living in a
primitive logging camp.
Figure 5
- Mary Jean and Dad, 1925
