Some Brief Remembrances by His Daughter Hazel Alice Williams-Robbins-Gravel (Dictated to her daughter, Tina Robbins-Coonce) Marion, Illinois 2001
I must emphasize that my father, “Jack” Williams did his best for his family in a difficult time and place. He never had much of a chance in life, and it’s a wonder he turned out as well as he did.
Life was rugged, and survival was still a challenge for the children of pioneers who settled the west. Just as all the others, my dad worked hard at whatever he could get, and used alcohol to ease the pain of life’s desperate grind.
And he was certainly more responsible than his own father had been. My grandfather, Lafayette, a.k.a. “Lafe” Williams had the carpentry skills to support his family, but had abandoned the family early on. He was the second of three dismal husbands for my dad’s mother, Mary Alice Cline.
Mary Alice had first been married to Charles Rivers, a.k.a. John Rivers, and had two daughters with him, Lily Belle and Iona May. Rivers was a U.S. Cavalryman, and later disappeared while on a mission. Some years later, a shallow grave was found with cavalry uniform buttons and parts of an old “Craig” rifle. Some thought those remains could have been his. But Mary Alice always maintained that he died while crossing the Snake River.
However, it is possible that he too had abandoned his family. He did have a reputation as a “traveling man,” and used at least two different names. Mary Alice’s third husband contended that Rivers “stole a horse and took off for the Baldies.”
With two children to support, Mary Alice next married Lafe, and gave birth to her third child in 1887, my father, Harvey Jackson Williams. But this marriage proved a disappointment too, and Lafe also left her - this time with three children to support, ages 2, 7, and 8.
In later years, discussing the difficulty of their life, Lily recalled that when the “wolf” was at the door, Mary Alice told them that help would come from her Warnock grandparents, who had a wonderful house near Salem. But it’s doubtful the help came, and it’s uncertain whether young Lily ever met her great-grandparents.
In spite of the primitive life in the Idaho-Oregon territory, Mary Alice must have had some degree of feminine attractiveness, because four years later, she married a third husband – coincidentally also named “Williams.”
Ephraim Williams was an impressive sight with red hair and a long red beard. She had seven more children with him. Some older descendants who knew him claim he resembled the actor Tom Selleck. But the similarity ends with physical appearance. He was an ignorant, brutal man who would regularly line the children up and beat them with a buggy whip, or leave them tied to a tree while he went to town.
Curiously, Mary Alice’s oldest daughter, Lily Belle Rivers, married Ephraim’s youngest brother, Grant Williams – a crazy-making situation for any genealogist trying to clarify relationship lines!
Mary Alice’s capacity for bad marriage choices was undoubtedly inherited from her own mother. Hellen Warnock was from a prominent Oregon pioneer family, i.e. the Warnock grandparents, but Hellen also married unwisely. Her family considered her husband a drunkard, and quite beneath them. The rough Jacob Jackson Cline, a.k.a. “J.J.” had driven an ox team across the plains when he was 17. After arriving in Oregon he fought in the Indian Wars of the Cascades, and drove a freight team on the Columbia River portage for Oregon Trail immigrants.
Hellen’s father, John Francis Warnock, was originally from Scotland and had a measure of fame in the region. He had led a colorful life of exploits and accomplishments around the world before settling in Oregon, and attaining even more distinction in the Battle of Abiqua. Speaking several languages, he was in demand as an interpreter, and became an educator of some consequence, as did some of his sons.
John Warnock took his wife in Oregon. The Mary Frances Halley was just a young girl when she traveled over the Oregon Trail with her family from Virginia. When they reached the dangerous rapids on the Columbia, an Indian offered to take her on horseback over the mountain. He promised he wouldn’t hurt the “little white squaw” if they gave him a red blanket.
The dashing John Warnock and the young girl from Virginia had a grand wedding for those times and place. Dr. John McLaughlin, head of the Hudson Bay Company, and later known as the “Father of Oregon,” gave her a pair of shoes to be married in.
The couple was life-long friends with the Applegates, who had headed the famed Great Migration of 1843. Their ten children would become respected settlers of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. However, at one point Mary Frances made a less than good choice. They owned a piece of property, which she though would never amount to much. So she traded it for a horse. That property is now part of downtown Portland!
But their oldest daughter, Hellen, disappointed them when she married J.J. Cline, and ensured a lower social status for her descendants. Hellen and J.J. Cline would have seven children, with Mary Alice being the first.
Mary Alice was raised with a less than ideal role model of manhood. It’s not surprising she chose less than responsible, genteel men. One husband disappeared and another left her. The third did stay with her, although he was abusive to their collective ten children. However, in fairness to her, there probably weren’t many well-bred men to choose from among the prospectors and laborers in the territories.
As is common with adolescent males in a difficult home life, especially with an abusive stepfather, my dad left home as soon as he was able. It broke his mother’s heart that they didn’t hear from him until he was twenty-eight years old. He never talked about that period, and there were rumors that he had spent a year in prison for killing a man in the street. Given the times, that certainly is possible. But I do not believe it. I can truthfully say I never saw any of the characteristic behavior in him which is common to men who have been imprisoned.
One thing is certain, by the time he was in his twenties; he was an illiterate alcoholic who didn’t like to work for others. When he was young, he wanted to go to the first grade, but said it took him half a day to run down a horse to get there, and soon just gave up. Although he became a very hard-working man, there were times he didn’t display much practical wisdom. While working as a ranch foreman in Mountain Home, Idaho, he tried to jump a horse across a concrete canal. It killed the horse and broke several of his bones.
But he was naturally intelligent and quite resourceful. During the Prohibition he bootlegged often, keeping his product in big tin barrels. He had cleverly placed the still into the ground, and made a perfect cover for it – a teeter-totter and merry-ground for us children. When suspicious government men came through, he proudly showed them the playground equipment he had built.
As so many others in the developing West, he was what was called a roust-about, finding his joy in liquor and women. Even as a young girl, I could see he was after any woman he could get. I remember hearing the ruckus that ensued when he attempted an affair with his my mother’s only friend! And one time, my brother Everett saw him having sex with a teenage girl behind a door.
But I also have very good memories of my father. He was an old-fashioned man who made a living with his hands. Though uneducated and immature, he did not have the mean violent character that was prevalent in that time. He was merciful and gentle with animals. It hurt him deeply when he had to kill one for food. He was always honorable - except when he was drunk or womanizing. And he expected us to be obedient. He tried to be fair with us. When we were older he used to say, ‘I should have whipped the tar out of you!’ But he only licked us once, when we did something he had told us not to do, and endangered our lives by getting in front of a tree he was felling.
My best memories are from the three years that Dad managed a ranch in Elk City, Idaho. Though not grand, the ranch house was reasonably adequate for the time. It was the first time we had ever lived with any relative comfort. Dad must have inherited some of his father’s carpentry skill, because while we lived there, he made skis, stilts and snow shoes for all of us.
But tragically, that temporary relatively normal life would not last. When my mother became seriously ill, he wanted to get medical help for her, but she refused, fearful that it would cost too much. I overheard her saying, “No, they’ll take our livestock and everything.” With hindsight, it would have been worth any cost to save her life. After several months in bed, the young mother of three, not yet thirty years old died on New Year’s Eve 1929.
My dad built a coffin, and kept her body in the living room for two weeks, waiting for her family to arrive via horse-drawn sled through the snow-covered mountains. He kept the front door open, allowing the 20 degrees below zero cold to slow the deterioration of her body. A local doctor, who had lost his license, came the two miles from town every day, and applied a salve to her face, in a futile attempt to prevent it from the shrinkage of death.
When her little family finally arrived the burial took place. Somehow the men had dug a grave in the frozen ground, and a horse-drawn sled hauled her coffin through the snow. It was lowered into the ground as the handful of mourners stood in brittle cold, with huge snowflakes swirling silently upon us.
Soon after, my dad returned to bootlegging, and drank heavily, taking my teenage brother, Everett, carousing with him. Being only eleven years old myself with my little five year old brother Bucky, we were left to fend for ourselves. One great-aunt from Grangeville came for a brief time to help, but Dad didn’t give her any money, and she couldn’t afford to stay.
Without the stabilizing influence of a wife, Dad eventually lost the ranch and we moved into an old house in town. It had a stove, one bedroom upstairs with bunk beds, and a small heater. All of us kids ran wild like neglected animals, depending on the kindness of neighbors for an occasional home cooked meal. Finally our grandmother came back and took us to Klamath Falls to live with them.
But Grandmother Annie Edwards was a bootlegger herself. At one point, Dad rode a horse from Idaho to Klamath Falls to see us. But Annie hid us from him. In the ensuing fracas, my father broke a beer bottle over her head. Apparently she prosecuted him, because he spent six weeks in jail for it.
Later we were sent to live with an aunt for a time. When we learned our father was seeing a young schoolteacher, we desperately hoped he would marry the young woman – who was rich by our poverty-stricken standards.
Finally Father went to work for a senator’s son out of Grant’s Pass, and for the first time could pay someone to look after his children. He hired a young woman named Marie Wiley. Her previous husband was also a bootlegger, who had been sent to prison for killing a cohort in a dispute, and Marie had divorced him. (Marie was related the theatrical Barrymores, but her fundamentalist family in the Midwest refused to have anything to do with such worldly people, although Marie’s mother had sung on a showboat at one time.)
In 1932 when Dad and Marie decided to get married, they walked nine miles into Grant’s Pass to do it. It was really exciting that she had a real bedroom set! We used apple boxes for chairs and handmade boxes with straw for beds. Then when we moved to Merlin, we had a house with a rocking chair, a table and chair, and a piece of broken mirror on the wall.
The hard-working and decent Marie enabled my Dad to get his children back, and she tried to create a home for us while laboring alongside him. While living out of Grant’s Pass, Oregon we were delighted to have plenty to eat - turkey eggs, goats milk, tallow for lard, and bee hives for honey.
However we had to give it up after a while and move to town, so I could start high school. There our diet was mostly of beans and potatoes. Dad would get up at 4:00 a.m. and walk miles up a mountain to cut logs, roll them down the hill, and begin the backbreaking labor of chopping out cedar shakes for siding and roofing.
Poverty often affects people in different ways, depending on their personal experiences and circumstances. Usually Marie was realistic and undaunted by our hardships. However, one occasion affected her deeply. She had become severely ill, unable to get out of bed, and Jack asked a doctor to come to the house. When the doctor arrived, Marie was so embarrassed because they had no pillowcase. In her later years, though she was never what one would call “well-off,” she managed to accumulate a good supply of pillowcases. She decorated many with embroidery or textile paint and gave them as gifts to loved ones.
Along with Dad’s willingness to do heavy work, his penchant for heavy drinking arose periodically. When he was married to my mother, I only remember him being drunk twice, and from the time he met Marie until they moved to Greenville, he couldn’t afford to drink. In Greenville he went out into the woods and worked everyday, and never laid up like some of them did. But after Bucky got out of school, he seemed to think he had no more responsibility, and his drinking became severe, and he was silly when he was drunk. He was no longer good-looking, his teeth were bad, and nobody would have wanted him. He wasted those last years in Greenville, and put Marie through hell.
He was like many alcoholics and gamblers - blind to their own waste of money, but angry at whatever their family spends on normal things. I remember that my poor little mother had only one pretty dress, which she ordered from a catalogue a few months before she died. When Marie, ordered a simple catalogue dress, Dad ranted and raved about the expense, accusing her of wanting to be a ‘socialite.’ He treated her awful. But she stayed with him until his drinking and womanizing became too much for her, and she finally divorced him.
In spite of good intentions toward his children, Dad had one behavior that undoubtedly scarred us for life. He was always verbally cruel and cutting. It was said that his mother, Mary Alice, was the same, and it was passed on to my brother, Bucky. Even though Bucky was a decent man who dedicated his life for his own family of ten children, he too was verbally caustic.
But believe me; Dad could put action behind his words when necessary. As other men at that time, he usually carried a .45 revolver. The memory of one occasion when it protected me still brings a wry smile to my face.
After I was married and living in a tiny one-room trailer, my Dad came to visit me occasionally. He told me he was “staying with friends,” but I knew he was sleeping under the bridge. One time he arrived during the daytime, and fell asleep on the small sofa bed. My husband, Jack Robbins was also an alcoholic, and became violently abusive and unpredictable when he was drunk. That night as Jack came home in a drunken rage, I managed to lock the door before he could get in. Unaware that Dad was in the trailer, Jack was threatening to hook the trailer onto his pick-up, haul it out into the country, where he would break in and kill me.
As he was occupied with hitching the trailer, Dad stepped out the door, and held his revolver to Jack’s head. It was a delight to see Jack stopped by something bigger and meaner than he was!
But a few years later, another confrontation between the two men turned out less satisfying. By this time, both men worked at the saw mill in Greenville, California. One day, my dad learned that Jack had beaten me severely. The next day at work, Dad threatened him, but Jack just snarled, “Oh shut up, old man!”
Dad was indeed getting older. He still worked hard in the woods everyday, and certainly didn’t let his age hinder his performance as a ladies’ man. One day he suddenly found himself fired from the mill when he attempted to romance the wrong woman. Out of work, he lost all self-esteem, and again began to drink heavily. He finally found some work as a ranch hand, but apparently had not learned his lesson, because he had an affair with the rancher’s wife, and the man ran him off with a shotgun.
Some time after that, Dad developed a growing pain in his leg. As rough men do, he ignored it at first. He finally went to a doctor, who said it was simply “rheumatism.” But the pain kept growing, and the diagnosis changed. An old boat injury to his leg had become a cancer that caused the bone in his leg to actually separate. One day he told me the pain was so bad that he would have killed himself, but the gun was across the room, and he couldn’t get to it. He was 61 years old when the spreading cancer took his life in 1948. Ironically it was a Christmas Eve. Twenty years earlier, my mother had also died on a holiday, New Year’s Eve.
My brother Bucky had to use his hard-earned family savings to pay for the funeral without even a dime left to pay the minister. Afterward Bucky rode a train back to his home in North Carolina with only a candy bar to eat.
Dad was given little exposure to religion during is lifetime, but I believe that he made his peace with God through a dying faith in Jesus Christ. Near death, coming in and out of a coma, he spoke of seeing a beautiful mountain and wondrous lake of glass. I am convinced that he was having glimpses of heaven, where I will see him someday.
But during those brief periods of consciousness, there was also a moment of almost comic relief. His old nemesis, my grandmother Annie Edwards, had died a few years previously. In a wakeful moment, he asked hopefully, “Are you sure the old lady’s dead?”
Many years later, when I was on my way to Alaska with my second husband, Jimmy Gravel, we were able to stop in Redding, California and go to Dad’s grave. Standing there again, after all those years, I wept bitterly for the only person who had ever really loved me – my Dad, Harvey Jackson Williams.
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