1899 — Cut Off In His Prime

Lemhi Republic, January 20th, 1899


Ulysses Group Sold

The entire Ulysses group of mines on Indian Creek has now passed into possession of P. N. Nicholas, of Geneva, N.Y., the first payment on B. F. Ibach’s half interest being made on Tuesday of this week. Mr. Ibach informs us that there is certain to be a mill put on the property in the spring, and if this is done, other properties in that vicinity will immediately assume a market value three times what they possess at present.

Among those who will profit most by this, we may mention Mr. Ibach, who is sole owner of the Kitty Burton, located about one mile from the Ulysses group; E. S. Suydam, who owns some valuable claims in the same neighborhood; and Marsing & Philling, who own promising claims situated between the Ulysses group and the Kitty Burton. The Kitty Burton was given a mill test last summer, producing an $800 brick from about 40 tons of ore, run through an arastra. All of the mines thus far discovered on Indian Creek contain ore of very high grade, the veins well defined, and the country showing none of the broken appearance fatal to so many mining districts. The future of this new district is very promising, indeed.

And so the sale was boom for our district, and we sure needed one. Roads had to be started—a wagon road from the Salmon River at Indian Creek to the mine, another to reach timber for the mill house and camp buildings. The men were itching for spring to arrive so they could begin work.

The ink was hardly dry on the peace treaty when the fighting flared again—not with Spain this time, but with the very people we were liberating. In February, shots cracked in Manila and suddenly we were at war with the Filipinos themselves. Our leaders called it “insurrection,” as if liberty had not been promised in the first place, but I knew better. Boys from Montana and Idaho who had marched off to chase Spain in Cuba, were now facing brown-skinned farmers and townsmen across the trenches, and calling it duty. The headlines still thundered about patriotism and destiny, but behind those words I heard the groan of mothers, the slog of boots in a foreign jungle, and the truth that wars never end as neatly as we were being led to believe.

Once in awhile I’d see an article written from the Philippines, authored by Jimmy Callahan and published in the Anaconda Standard.

The river finally broke at Deadwater and spring came with a blast of ice that groaned and shuddered as it headed downriver. Harry Guleke was in Salmon building a scow he intended to take all the way to Buffalo Hump after he unloaded the freight for Indian creek and Shoup. He came through at the end of the first week of April and promised to write if they made it.[1]

I took the footpath above the river to the post office one afternoon, expecting nothing more than a pleasant spring walk and perhaps a stale newspaper, a circular, or a letter from my sister Edna. I usually rode, but the day seemed made for walking and the children would be out of school soon. When I reached town the small crowd outside greeted me in their usual way. Two men tipped their hats. I collected my mail, shuffling through the familiar bundle, when an envelope in an unfamiliar hand stopped me short. Inside was a folded newspaper clipping from the Anaconda Standard. Before I had it halfway open my eyes caught on the word Martyr—and I knew.

I slid it back into the envelope, gathered the rest of the mail, and walked past friends I would normally talk with, crossed the road only stopping until I’d reached the edge of town. There I leaned against a tree—not for comfort, but because I had to lean somewhere—and read it through, every line, every omission and commission, every carefully chosen word that claimed to sum up his life.

MARTYR TO HIS COUNTRY

James A. Callahan

Falls A Victim of Filipino Bullets

CUT OFF IN HIS PRIME

James A. Callahan of Company K, who is reported in yesterday's Manilla dispatches, as having been killed while fighting in Manilla, was a well known and highly esteemed citizen of this city, and the news of his death was a sad blow to his numerous friends in Anaconda.

Callahan had resided in Anaconda for 5 years and had been employed at the converters and in several of the departments at the works. He came to this city in 1894 from Boise, Idaho, where he had been employed for more than 2 years as head clerk of the Grand Central Hotel. He was a well educated man, polite and sober, and one who makes friends in an instant.

When the Governor issued the call for volunteers, Callahan, went to the Lieut. J.M. Kennedy and begged him to try and have him go with the regiment. Mr. Kennedy told Callahan that he did not believe he would be capable of passing the examination as he was not of requisite height. Callahan passed the Doctors examinations and he was elated over the fact that he would go to the front. He went with the Anaconda Company.

Callahan had the reputation of being the most competent fellow in Company K, and he acted as the clerk of the Company. Callahan was about 40 years of age and a widower. The only relatives he was known to have had was a married sister who resides in Michigan, and another sister, who is a Sister of Charity. It is not known what community she now is in.

Callahan often wrote letters to the Standard, in which he gave interesting news about the doings of our boys at the front. His last letter to this paper was written March 1. In it he mentioned that the Anaconda men were doing some very hot fighting and that they were anxious to get home.

Sadness rose inside of me, for Jimmy Callahan was my first, God help me. First man I loved, first man I lost. Not just in death, but long before. He left me once in the flesh and again in print.[2]

The river moved below the steep bank, my eyes swept to the east. We’d ridden it together once, down from Salmon City to Shoup, before the babies came, when love was in full bloom, before the lies and the silence. I remember him laughing over the roar, catching my eyes through the spray, thinking we were invincible.

Not quite thirteen years had passed, though it felt like a hundred—and somehow, like only yesterday. May God rest his wandering soul.

Now the river knew what I knew: that story was over. But the children he left behind were still mine to raise, and the parts of him I couldn't forget—those were mine too. I folded the newspaper page, put it back in the envelope and placed it in the pocket of my coat, determined to hide it, not out of sentiment, but from the eyes of Alta and Ed. When the school house emptied of children we walked home, the boys tearing off ahead of Alta and me.

That time of year, the steelhead came pushing upriver—long, muscled fish with backs like brushed pewter, flinging themselves through the current toward whatever spawning beds still remained. I watched for them out of habit. They came whether anyone welcomed them or not, driven by something old and unfinished. Just like memory. Just like grief.

We spotted fisherman on the shore and I hollered out to the boys that they could go fishing soon as they reached their poles. Alta beat them home.

The river kept moving as rivers do, and so did we. I never sat the children down to tell them what became of their father. Some griefs come too heavy for words and silence takes their place.

I had put my feet up one May evening and opened the latest Home Monthly, never expecting it to carry a thread of one of the dearest people I had ever known. And there it was—Richard Realf, Poet and Soldier—with his likeness printed bold and his life laid out.

I read of Realf’s childhood in England, his days with John Brown, flag-bearing at Missionary Ridge during the Civil War, his suicide in San Fransisco and in the middle of it, as though it were a passing fact fit for any housewife to sip her tea over, the words: “In 1865, while still serving as a soldier, Realf contracted his first legal marriage with Sophie E. Graves, thereby beginning the third and most unhappy chapter in a life which seems to have been written by misfortune itself. When Realf left his wife in an Indiana village in order to follow his regiment he had apparently every intention of returning to her. His letters to her from camp were frequent and affectionate. There is every evidence that he intended to rejoin her at the close of the war; but in the meantime he had been seized by a fancy for a belle of Washington society, and on receipt of his discharge went to that city. He never saw Sophie Graves again . . .”[3]

I stepped over to mantle where I kept my photograph of my dear Aunt Sophie, knowing what the author did not. Sophia Emery Realf had died in Indiana in 1892.

Sophie. My Sophie. We shared the last years of my childhood—those in-between seasons when a girl grows restless for more of the world and finds comfort in her aunt’s breadth of knowlege and laughter. I finally understood the sorrows buried beneath that gentle smile she wore, but here they were, laid bare in black print. I sat her picture on the table next to my sitting chair and continued reading.

I had read Realf’s verses here and there through the years, never guessing those poems were bound by law and heartbreak to my Aunt Sophie’s life.

The article did not spare him—his lapses, his drink, his women and unlawful marriages—but it crowned his verse, and even printed the poem he scratched out as he swallowed poison. In the end it called him a human poet, close to the people, who suffered greatly but fought bravely.

That night I slept fitfully and in the days that followed my thoughts kept circling back to Sophia. Back to our sweet days on the coast of Maine, when the salt wind tangled our hair and the sea itself seemed to keep our secrets. I saw her again, as clearly as if she had only just stepped out of the room: Sophie walking the rocky shore, her skirts gathered in one hand, her eyes bright with laughter even as the wind caught her bonnet. She would pause to recite a line she cherished, her voice solemn in the spray and I would answer with some rhyme of my own. In the evenings we bent together by lamplight, she steady with her pen, I leaning close, learning from her patience and her grace.

Those were the hours between childhood and womanhood, both quiet and boisterous, most of all so full of my dear Aunt Sophie. To remember them now, through casual ink of a magazine article, was to feel again both the sweetness of her presence and the weight of her pain. I had known Sophia—and I knew how men leave. Days passed before I took a grip on my senses and people stopped asking me what troubled me.

That spring a swirl of gossip rose around Sam James’ probate hearing when Julia James—née Howard—turned up in Salmon City, and when she finally left two months later, after settling he husband’s estate, Ada Merritt seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.[4]

Word had it that when Julia James sought to prove her marriage to the late Samuel M. James, she sent for testimony all the way from Montana. And who better to deliver the goods than old Judge Henri J. Burleigh himself, who once officiated the ceremony back in 1883. From his office in the Power Building in Helena, the judge obliged with a sworn account that spilled more than just the legal facts.

Burleigh, who’d served as Justice of the Peace in Salmon City, remembered Sam James well. His affidavit stated that Sam had turned up at his house one afternoon, neatly dressed and freshly shaven, asking the judge to marry him to Miss Julia Howard. Burleigh wasn’t one to act rashly, and said that he spoke with Sam for half an hour to ensure he was sober and of sound mind. He judged him clear-headed and deliberate.

Then, doing his due diligence, Burleigh asked for a private word with Julia. She was found at her lodgings—across from the jail, in Michael Spahn's old brewery. Burleigh sent her kin from the room and questioned her for ten solid minutes. Satisfied she was free to marry, he called the party back in and married them.

No cake, no champagne, not even a kiss on the cheek. Just the ceremony, a few polite words, and the judge made his exit as quickly as manners would allow. It was, he said, a strictly private affair. But he was sure of one thing: Sam James knew what he was doing—and he did it sober as a preacher.

At least, that’s what the judge recalled. But ask around in Salmon or Shoup, and you’d hear a different tale entirely. According to the locals, Sam had been three sheets to the wind the night before and the wedding took place in the wee hours of the morning. He woke up in a strange bed beside Julia and squinting at the morning light with a pounding head, reportedly asked, “Who are you?”

To which she coolly replied, “Your wife.”[5]

That was all it took. Sam got out of bed, dressed in a hurry and high-tailed it downriver without so much as a backward glance. It wasn’t long before Julia left town—with the wedding certificate in hand.

Julia stood to inherit half of Sam’s estate—which, after the court settled his debts and wrangled through the lawyer fees, came out to around $2,300.[6] The other half was split up among his brothers and sisters, bless ’em. I reckon none of ’em got rich off it. Still, it was more than Julia started with—and a fair bit more than Sam left her the morning he slipped out of Salmon with a hangover and no memory of saying “I do.” That’s near eighty-seven thousand dollars nowadays—not bad for a foggy wedding and a runaway groom.

The indomitable Captain Guleke made it to Buffalo Hump and was back before the end of June, arriving in Shoup with two flat boats lashed together with supplies.[7]

When at last the word came that our Idaho and Montana boys were sailing home, the entire county seemed to breathe again. It was autumn before the trains bore them from San Francisco into the mountains, and every town along the line dressed itself in flags and bunting. Brass bands played, bonfires blazed, and mothers clutched their sons as if they might never let go again. Yet beneath the jubilee was a quiet sorrow—for every soldier who made it home, there was another who would never return, his grave left far away in the tropic soil. The homecoming was joy and grief together, woven so tight you could not pull them apart.

NOTES

[1] Idaho Recorder, April 5, 1899.

[2] Private James A. Callahan survived the perilous crossing of the Pampanga River at Calumpit on April 26, 1899, but was struck down soon after. Fellow soldiers later recalled that as the men rested, they took turns seeking shade beneath a small tree. When Callahan moved to claim his turn, he was shot in the abdomen. The wound left him paralyzed; he lingered for about twenty minutes before dying—details that only came to light many years after his death and through the men who had been near James when he died. See Long Crossings, for the story of James A. Callahan's life.

[3] “Richard Realf, Poet and Soldier,” Home Monthly (Pittsburgh, Pa.), May 1898, by Helen Delay, pp. 9–11. The Home Monthly, edited by Mary Roberts Rinehart and others, was a popular women’s magazine published from 1896 to 1900 by the Home Monthly Publishing Company of Pittsburgh. While we can’t be sure that Annie ever read of this story, it wouldn’t have been unheard of. It was a story that the literary world seized upon and Annie was known to have been well read, subscribing to many magazines and periodicals.

[4] Idaho Recorder, June 28, 1899

[5] The Salmon River, 1978 by Cort Connell and John Carrey, p. 90.

[6] Samuel James Mosby Probate Records, Lemhi County, Estate Case Files, I-J 1876-1950

[7] Idaho Recorder, June 21, 1899