CHAPTER 7
I DRIVE A COAL WAGON—PILE LUMBER—CAPTURE A MURDERER AND DOCK WALLOP IN MILWAUKEE
MY FIRST job in Milwaukee was driving a coal wagon for H. B. Pearson. He was an alderman and a prosperous coal dealer on West Water Street. In my memory he dwells as one of the best men in the world, just because he had a kind word and a bread-getting place for me. It was the early part of the spring of 1880. I was twenty years old and big and strong enough to do anything.
Spring came with a rush that soon put the coal wagon out of business, but not before I learned a good deal about the streets and lay of the city. Right away I asked why none of the streets crossed the river straight and why all of them bore different names after crossing. Mr. Pearson patiently told me the reasons and said that they were the same that kept Milwaukee back, and from being a bigger place than Chicago. When the town was first started local rivalries, that have killed more towns than any other cause, were a conflagration in Milwaukee. Three towns separated by the Kinni-Kinnick and Milwaukee rivers strove against one another. They were Juneautown, Walkertown and Kilbourne City, and so bitter were they that bridges were not built and there were many fights and much bad blood. Men build cities even more than nature. The fact that Milwaukee is a city at all with the bad start it got proves that it has better natural advantages than Chicago.
By the time the coal wagon had to go the season of navigation had opened, and lumber hookers were coming in with their green cargoes. Mr. Pearson helped me to get a job piling lumber in Durr & Rugee’s lumber yard on the south side. It was hard work and by quitting time I was always tired, but not so much so that I could not do night work on Gregory Hurson’s Goodrich docks.
I got ninety cents a day in the lumber yard and twenty cents an hour for dock-walloping, plus kicks and curses at the latter.
An attic over Godfrey & Crandall’s job printing shop on Michigan Street furnished a place to sleep on a pallet on the floor. It was always a soft pallet after I got through dock walloping at ten or eleven o’clock. Sometimes I worked until midnight loading or unloading vessels, and the work was quite certain to be had every night.
Real trouble soon brewed at the lumber yard. I was the only American on the job. All the others were Poles and the foreman was Polish. They conspired against me and gave me the worst end of it, or I thought they did, when it came to unloading a schooner. I noticed that two Poles were assigned to take away from one man over the rail. I had to do that job alone, and there were other signs that I was not welcome among them. Since that time I have been treated better in Poland that I was by the Polacks in Durr & Rugee’s yard. Things were coming to a pass where there had to be a show down, and then I was certain I would have to go. My employers, no matter how fair, could not keep me as against all the balance of the gang.
There was a turn of good luck, if ever there is such a thing, and I think there is because so many things happen in a person’s life that cannot be traced to their cause source within the individual.
Two young fellows from Louisville named Baber and Gesswein had started an evening newspaper called the Signal. It is now the Milwaukee Journal, with many hiatuses between. George Yenowine was also one of the unlucky Kentuckians. They got into debt to Godfrey & Crandall, the printers, in whose attic I had my abode, and lost their struggling property for printing bills.
Hampton Leedom, a sturdy man of middle age, with hunch-back, red visage and kind heart, kept the books for Godfrey & Crandall and for some others. He, too, often worked at night and I became acquainted with him and he took an interest in me that I shall never forget. It was Mr. Leedom who told me about the Signal and its troubles. I told him about the newspaper and printer’s work I had done, and he promised to keep a look out for me for a job.
Before taking the coal wagon I had been to every printer and publisher in Milwaukee. I could not hang around long because I had not done better up to that time than to work from hand to mouth, and there did not seem to be a job in prospect anyhow. One night Hampton Leedom advised me not to go to the lumber yard next day because he had been telling George Godfrey, of Godfrey & Crandall, about me. I took his advice.
Mr. Godfrey was a slight, swart man who had character and ability. He looked over his spectacles at me and appeared cross but he was not. I had heard a good deal about him. He was a greenbacker, and from what I had heard of greenbackers from my father, I had a great prejudice against them and could not understand how a man could be one and a respectable citizen at the same time. That George Godfrey could be gave me a measure of his versatility.
He also printed the Milwaukee Commercial Letter, which was edited by Mr. Friese, commercial editor of the Sentinel. Mr. Godfrey told me he was anxious to get circulation for the Signal, an ambition quite common to publishers at all times. He said he did not wish to keep the paper but could not dispose of it to advantage without building it up some. I thought it queer that he should tell me these things and concluded it must be because I came from LaFayette, where he had a brother, the Methodist preacher. It was not this at all as I came to know. He was just one of those open men who think aloud and consequently never lie.
I got a job soliciting subscriptions. The Signal was Milwaukee’s first two-cent paper. The working people had never been canvassed, I think, for they seemed eager to try the daily at ten cents a week. I secured as many as fifty subscribers in a day at Bay View, where lived the rolling mill employees and other better paid, skilled workmen.
My success made me quite famous in the office. Hampton Leedom told me I ought to shuck my Hoosier togs as not being suited to my new stratum in the world. He gave me a credit with F. P. Gluck, tailor, and I used it to obtain my first made-to-order suit.
My big cowboy hat went into the discard with the old clothes for all of which I got one dollar and eighty cents, at a West Water Street den of three-ball finance.
Mr. Godfrey was running the paper in quite a popular way. He took a good deal of advice from Robert Schilling, whose socialist paper, Der Deutsche Reformer, was printed at Godfrey & Crandall’s. Schilling was a strong, earnest, honest propagandist.
A newspaper man named C. C. Bowsfield came along and made an offer for the Signal. He got it and changed the name to the Chronicle.
Because I knew how to handle the carrier boys, as demonstrated one turbulent evening, Bowsfield made me city circulator. I got the routes arranged and made a pretty good start with street sales and newsdealers, before I was transferred to the editorial department. This was what I had been praying for. Not that the writing end of the paper was very formidable, because it was not, but it was on the way for me.
Bowsfield chewed a toothpick and looked wise and important as owner and editor, and I was certain he felt just as he looked.
Darwin Pavey, assistant to Bowsfield, was between six and seven feet tall, very skeletony and always looked hungry as his big, gray eyes wandered about his foodless environs. It seemed to me that he was always writing puffs for the Newhall House that never got onto the advertising books. This was proved right by finding out that he got his dinner at that hotel without other pay. They even permitted him to carry fruit and stuff away from the table. Now and then he would bait me with a taste of these titbits.
It was great to watch him pick his teeth with a wire he carried to clean his pipe. I thought that I would strive to become a great editor like Mr. Pavey and also pick my teeth with a pipe wire after enjoying a sumptuous dinner at a two-dollar hotel.
The Chronicle did not prosper any better than the Signal. Bowsfield got new blood and some money into it by interesting Frank A. Flower. I never had known such a man as Flower. He seemed to me to be a walking dictionary. But he could not supply the nourishment the Chronicle needed.
My salary was supposed to be seven dollars a week. I had been getting enough of this barely to live up to the point it stopped altogether. My last week on the paper is memorable for several reasons. I had been sent to pawn Mrs. Flower’s ear rings in order to pay the printers.
We were all in terrible shape. I had gone from living on fifteen cents a day to a generous free-lunch saloon on East Water Street, across from the city hall, to which I was introduced by George C. Youngs, a printer friend.
Every day, nearly, I scooped our rival, the Evening Wisconsin. The very police seemed to be won by the struggle I was making and everybody helped out with exclusive news.
Walter Gardner, city editor of the Wisconsin, sent for me. I went with quaking knees, caused as much by lack of food as by awe and desire to get a job on the richest paper in town. Not in all my life before or since have I wanted anything so much. Mr. Gardner asked me how I would like to work on the Wisconsin. I replied with profound insincerity:
“Oh! I don’t know.”
Manifestly he was surprised.
“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you realize that you are a real newspaper man the minute you come over here?”
I bantered him with the query: “Is that why they call it the Evening Granny!”
Gardner was said to be a college man. They were rare in newspaper offices then. He had a reputation and was superior, but he had but a dim sense of humor. I could see that he was struggling between a desire to kick me out and a kind of admiration of my audacity. If he had known how high my gulp was he would have hired me on the spot. Perhaps he did know somewhat. Anyhow he offered me ten dollars a week. I am afraid now that I tried to give him the impression that my wages were more than that on the Chronicle, but such a preposterous idea could not have lodged in his sober brain.
We had more conversation. I told him that on the Chronicle I was the whole thing, which now was the truth, with the exception that the paper never would have come out if it had not been for Julia O’Brien, a type sticker, and Dick Bavis, the foreman.
They kept the crew going with such pawnshop money as I could raise for Bowsfield and Flower, who were afraid they would be caught at it and so sent me.
Finally, Gardner offered me twelve dollars a week and the haggling stopped instantly. It was big wages even in Chicago, and unusually good for Milwaukee. I had not been on the Wisconsin long before Mr. Gardner and I clashed. He ordered me to write in his style, which I could not do, and for that matter nobody could except himself. He said he would fire me, which was a bluff. It sent me with my trouble to Uncle Billy Cramer, senior of Cramer, Aikens & Cramer, owners of the Wisconsin and also of a big job and ready print business that made them rich.
Uncle Billy was as deaf as a big collection of adders and nearly blind also. His other senses were unimpaired and the story of his marriage some time after this incident was a raw morsel among the boys.
I think my nerve in bracing him personally appealed to him. Anyhow, Mr. Gardner went on an extended leave for his health, and upon returning became an editorial writer.
The Chronicle had been unloaded on Tom and Jim Somers, democratic lawyers who wanted an organ. They got one. Frank Flower came over on the “Wisconse” to take Gardner’s place as city editor. The old paper took on more life than a doped race horse.
I was permitted to run an astounding scandal of the county farm, involving the big German chairman of the county board of supervisors and a crippled moron girl.
The county chairman threatened to kill me on sight. A. H. Schattenberg, clerk of the school board, warned me of my danger and, as it was against the law to carry concealed weapons he gave me a hatchet to defend myself with. I wore it openly in a belt, and Judge Mallory, of the Municipal Court, said it was all right. Julius Meiswinkel, clerk of the court, and Alvin Wiebers, his assistant, gave me a duly signed permit to carry a hatchet until I elected to bury it.
This began to make me a marked reporter. Also I never walked. During the time I was in Milwaukee I always ran wherever I went. Oftentimes I beat other reporters who went in cabs and besides I saved the cab hire.
The libeled person took a new tack. He had Uncle Billy arrested for criminal libel and had me arrested on the same charge. It was the first time on record that an attempt was made to fasten such responsibility onto an employee. John J. Orton, the regular Cramer, Aikens & Cramer attorney, and W. H. Ebbitts, a noted criminal lawyer of the time, defended us. We were put in jail for a short time for the dramatic effect.
On the very same day a German youth named Herman Hilden murdered his stepfather. The Chicago Tribune got the thing mixed. It carried a Milwaukee dispatch to the effect that I was arrested for murder and Hilden for criminal libel. As the Tribune had a large circulation at LaFayette my bad reputation thereabout was further fortified.
We had the goods, so nothing came of our prosecution except an uplift of my local reputation. The Chicago Tribune asked me to take charge of its Milwaukee bureau, which I did. Also I got quite a string of outside papers and began to make money as I looked at things.
The Chicago Times’ man in Milwaukee—both Tribune and Times had Milwaukee bureaus then—was a booze fighter for fair, and I had the good luck to protect him in his job for quite a long time.
One day Herman Hilden broke jail with other prisoners. John Rugee, of Durr & Rugee, had become sheriff. Fat office those times. He offered a reward of three hundred dollars for Hilden. A clever girl friend of mine, a telegraph operator at Appleton, reported to me that she thought she had spotted Hilden. I followed up the clew, located him and told the Milwaukee sheriff. I waived all claim to the reward, but saw that the girl got her share.
My position in the matter, which seemed to me was a simple one and right, made me a very lion for a time. Sheriff Rugee gave a big dinner for me and presented me with a huge, gold-headed cane which quite floored me. I did not any more know what to do with that cane than I would with an elephant’s trunk, if one had been tied to me. Its destiny was to be broken over a dog that snapped at our first baby. At the Rugee dinner it was discovered that less than a year before I had been a lumber piler in his yard, and it made quite a hit.
Soon afterwards a big wholesale Jew clothing house was burned. John Black, assistant fire chief, told me the owners had done it. He took me from floor to floor and showed me piles of kerosened clothing that had not completely burned. It was a great story and when I told Frank Flower all about it he let it go. Of course, it created a tremendous sensation, which was felt in the office as well as outside. The owners started a libel suit. It looked like a bad fight, and while we of the city staff were hot for it, our wealthy bosses were not so keen.
Two days later occurred Milwaukee’s greatest tragedy, the burning of the Newhall House and one hundred and eleven persons. This swept the boards of the public mind clear of everything, including our threatened libel suit.
Parenthetically, the insurance on the clothing stock was never paid.
The night the Newhall House burned I was in that fated fire trap until after midnight, looking up inside stuff about the failure of Dixon & Co., grocers. I can see Tom Thumb yet as he reached up his cue to his eyes while playing billiards. After watching him for some time I left. All the way home, for now I was married, I had one of those feelings that are unexplainable. Gamblers call them hunches. Spiritualists call them warnings. I was certain that some big thing was about to happen. It was the first time I had sensed anything like it enough to be impressed. The Newhall House was a fire trap. Everybody predicted it would burn. I had been in it for some hours just before and wandering through its narrow hallways, had dwelt upon the fire butts and dried and wrinkled reels of rotten hose. Maybe that had a lot to do with my feelings.
I lived on 21st Street on the West side near Grand Avenue, and had reached the corner of 18th Street on that stately thoroughfare. About I faced and started downtown. Just as I got to 16th Street a fire alarm sounded, quickly followed by a general alarm. It was January. I ran as swiftly as I could go and just reached the scene in time to witness the ineffaceable spectacle of the jumping of waitress girls from their sixth-story attic rooms into the alley below. Some of the guests leaped into the telegraph wires and broke their fall. My old employer, Uncle Billy Cramer, lived at the Newhall. I soon discovered, to my gladness, that he had been led out quite safely.
Tom Thumb received injuries from which he subsequently died. Billy Didsworth, of the American Express Company, arrived just in time to see two of his best friends, Mr. and Mrs. Joslyn, jump to death. Mr. Joslyn was prominent on ’change. With his wife he occupied the third floor corner rooms of Broadway and Michigan. Mr. Dodsworth had influenced them to put up a private fire escape, but in their panic they forgot it. I have had and have witnessed a good many tragic things in my life but nothing so appalling as the Newhall holocaust. The men I saw dying at the siege of Constantinople had a chance and were not caught like rats in a trap.
Jesse James was operating up in Wisconsin then, and the Williams Brothers, of Dunn County, were supposed to be a part of his gang. Every detective or would-be Vidocq in the West and a lot from the East had lurid dreams of rounding up the James outfit or some of it. Old Bill Beck, who had a piece of his jaw shot off, leaving an ugly facial scar, was the first chief of police I knew in Milwaukee. He was a war time secret service detective and typical. Under his direction quite a detective force incubated. Some of them were too funny for anything even then, but Janssen and Riemer, Billy McManus, John Hannifin, and Smith and Sheehan did good work from the first. John A. Hinsey had charge of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad detectives with headquarters in Milwaukee. That was before the offices were moved to Chicago. Alexander Mitchell and S. S. Merrill were directing the masterful contest waged against the Chicago & Northwestern for control in the new Northwest. William C. VanHorne was general superintendent and was making his record as a lieutenant that resulted in his being drafted by the Canadian Pacific promoters. Fred Underwood, afterwards president of the Erie, was a brakeman. His home was out at Wauwatosa, where his father was a dignified minister of the gospel. Tom Shaughnessy, afterwards Lord Shaughnessy, was dealing out candles and wicking as a clerk in the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad storehouse, and his father was a faithful, Third Ward policeman, with a brogue like overcooked mush.
James J. Hill and Donald Smith, the latter afterwards Lord Strathcona, were beginning to appear in the horizon of the Northwest. The United States had just failed to see and take advantage of a chance to purchase nearly a million square miles of Hudson Bay Territory, which would have given us an unbroken domain to the North Pole, including the now famous hard wheat belt of the North.
The vast Northwest had begun to sizzle as the fires of settlement and commercial desires moved up to it. One could tell the story on and on for they were making men in Milwaukee then.
Well, as I was saying, all the sleuths were after Jesse James. A deputy sheriff named Jim Greding had more imagination and less sense than any one person I ever saw. He thought he was a detective. Laboring under that delusion he did more odd things than could be told in a tome. Once he came to me and told me in a whisper that would burst the listening ear of Dionysius in the latomia of Syracuse, that he had located his quarry. I followed him over to Grand Avenue. He stealthily approached the sales-room of the Singer Sewing Machine, where an inoffensive citizen named Beach was planning further raids on the Wheeler & Wilson.
“That’s him!” said Jim.
It was hard to keep my face straight, but I sicked Jim on until Beach nearly broke every bone in his body. This didn’t feaze him, for one day a rube named William Kuhl came to town and Jim at once marked him for the desperado Lon Williams. He really got Kuhl into the coop and finding a scar on his toe that tallied with Williams, they spirited him to Dunn County for final identification, which was so successful that it proved conclusively who he was not.
But Jim had us all fooled for a while. I had myself locked up with the pseudo Lon, and so eager was I to believe Kuhl to be a villain for the story there was in it, that I had no difficulty in doing so. It was a great lesson to me.
I learned how easily one can be misled in the direction he would like to proceed.
