1874 -1884 — The Silence Between

Here Annie’s voice goes quiet while I step in to keep her story moving until her words return. For ten years she slips beyond the public record, leaving me—as both author and kin—to search the silence, to wonder at what is missing and to hope that some forgotten trace might yet come to light.

The last certainty is this: in 1877, during the gold rush to South Dakota, Annie’s father, Edward Graves, organized a company of men from Knox County, Maine, eager to get rich quick. He may have put the farm in the hands of relatives and sent Mercy and the children to live on Matinicus Island. His foray into the Black Hills and western Wyoming proved brief. By the time the 1880 census was taken, the Graves family was living on Matinicus Island together. But Annie was not with them.

Nor have I found her in any 1880 census record—not in Maine, not with relatives, not under any variation of her name. It is as if she fell off the page.

Did Annie travel west with her father in the late 1870s and remain behind to teach school? Or did she join her Aunt Sophia Realf when she left Maine for Massachusetts. We know that by 1880 Sophia had returned to Indiana in time to appear with her sister, Louisa and brother-in-law Edwin Furness in the 1880 census. Annie isn't with them though and Sophia Graves Realf died in 1882.

Was she still in Maine—perhaps graveside in South Thomaston when her family buried six-year-old Rodney on November 12, 1882?

Her absence in public records feels personal, not merely logistical.

After Castine did she pursue further education elsewhere? College records from that era are fragmentary although the knowledge Annie displayed in later years suggests more than a single term at Normal School.

A possible clue comes from the Sacramento Daily Record-Union of February 28, 1883, which published a list of passengers arriving in San Francisco from Pueblo, Colorado by way of Newhall. Among them: an Annie C. Graves. Did she live in Colorado and California before turning up in Butte?

By 1888, her brother Leland appears in a Santa Cruz, California list of residents— twenty-four years old and working as an engineer. Did Annie and Leland head west together earlier in the decade?

The questions remain. Somewhere, names still hide in ledgers and letters that wait in attic trunks.

She disappears from the record for a decade like a figure moving past the edge of a photograph—but her story, even in silence, remains warm to the touch. Whether she spent those years in college or braving some other corner of the West, Annie was changing, seasoning. Somewhere along the way she let go of comfort and kin, finding herself among freight ledgers and gritty miners for we know that about 1884, Annie was teaching school in Butte, Montana. Where she went and what she saw between her last traces in Maine and her arrival in Butte remains one of the enduring mysteries of her life. But the record resumes in smoke, noise and metal.[1]

Butte was not only the largest city in Montana Territory—it was the largest between Chicago and San Francisco. Unless the wind was blowing, Annie would not have seen much of the town when she stepped off the train. The rail yard sat nearly a mile below Uptown and Butte’s smelters filled the sky with a choking haze of lead, sulfur, arsenic and selenium. On a calm day smoke erased the mountains.

The first miners had come for gold and silver in the 1860s. By 1881, copper was discovered—just in time for the electrification of the country. Butte exploded. By 1885 the city boasted eighty mines, six major mills and enough smelters to refine the ore into pure metal. Twenty thousand pounds of copper came out of the hill each day, worth nearly a million dollars a month—and enough smoke to poison air and soil for decades.

People came from across the world came to work here but the Irish dominated. Gaelic could be heard as often as English, more often than Italian, Cornish, Chinese, Spanish, or Russian combined. The Butte Miners Union had 1,800 members, and other crafts organized too, joining together as the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly, which represented over 6,000 workers. Silver Bow County earned the nickname “the Gibraltar of Unionism.”

Every ethnic community staked a corner of town. The Irish crowded Dublin Gulch and Corktown. Eastern Europeans built homes in the McQueen Addition. Italians settled Meaderville. Cornish miners raised their Queen Anne cottages along Butte Hill in Centerville—houses that outlasted nearly everything else. Roughly ten percent of Butte’s population was Chinese, with gardens, shops, and homes filling five blocks below Reeder’s Alley. The wealthy gravitated to North Rodney Street, near the courthouse, where the air was thinner and quieter.

The trains brought in laborers and machinery. They rolled out with refined metals, lumber, grain, cattle and produce bound for the Midwest and beyond.

It was here amid the smoke and clang that Annie met a miner named James Callahan.

Mining was dangerous. A premature blast could kill or maim without warning. Many more miners wasted away from pneumonia, tuberculosis, or miner’s lung. James worked in the converters, a brutal position where heat and gas separated copper from matte in the final stage of smelting.

James was a year older than Annie and stood just shy of five foot six. Annie was five feet tall and together they no doubt made a small, handsome couple.

They shared good educations and an interest in mining, though in other ways they were opposites. James was Catholic, Annie a Protestant. He was a miner; she taught school. Annie had been raised on a rocky farm in coastal Maine, while James, depending on who you asked, grew up either in upstate New York or in the Brooklyn where his father resided around the turn of the century.[2] He was literate and single. She was a spinster by 1886—almost thirty but not for lack of beauty or poise. She was also expecting a baby.

James A. Callahan and Annie Crie Graves were married on June 17, 1886, in Silver Bow County.[3] Their neighborhood is unrecorded, but with a name like Callahan, Dublin Gulch or Corktown seems likely.

Annie came by her interest in the West honestly. Her father, Edward Small Graves, had joined the California gold rush. He spent two years in Placerville before returning to Maine to settle his affairs and sail again. He meant to make a permanent home in California but contracted Chagres fever while crossing the Isthmus of Panama. He reached San Francisco too ill to continue his pursuits and returned to Maine in 1852.

Edward Graves married Mercy Kalloch Hathorne. Annie was their first child and stories of distant diggings colored her childhood. When she came of age her father once again headed west, joining a party of Knox County men bound for the Dakotas and Wyoming in 1877. He returned empty-handed but Annie had grown up on the glitter of secondhand gold.[4]

A few months after their wedding they set out for Salmon City, Idaho—175 rugged miles south of Butte—preparing to go farther still.

Salmon City had been on the map for twenty years, built to serve the placer mines of Leesburg where thousands once washed gold from gravel-choked streams. Leesburg’s heyday had passed but new discoveries kept Salmon City alive. By 1882 quartz had been struck west of the North Fork. The town of Shoup sprang up in response and by 1886 it was four years old. James and Annie fixed their eyes on it.

That October they gathered on the riverbank just off Main Street where freight boats were built.

The novelty of a launch had not worn off. Crowds still lined the banks. But that day carried extra interest: Annie Callahan was the first woman to ride down to Shoup by boat, and she was about five months pregnant.

The river current was treacherous. Boulders jutted high. Sandbars shifted. A trip that might take two days could stretch to three—or end in disaster if the boat grounded or capsized.

The flat boats, called “steamers” but only in jest. They were powered only by sweep and stern were thirty-four feet long and eight wide, built to ride high and fast. Once they reached Shoup, they were dismantled for timbers and walls. Nothing floated out once it floated in.

Annie left no account of her voyage but one year later the photographer William H. Philliner took a similar ride and described it in the Idaho Recorder of November 5, 1887. His words, edited here for brevity, offer the closest glimpse into Annie’s experience.

When Annie landed at Shoup, the townsfolk would have been stunned to see a woman step out of the boat. Only two other married women lived downriver then: Elizabeth Merritt and Mary Sweeney, who had come in 1883 by pack trail. No woman had ever arrived in the current.

From that moment on, Annie belonged to the river.

Notes

[1] A commemorative booklet published by the Idaho Recorder in 1927 states that Annie arrived in Lemhi County in 1884 to teach school (see Appendix); The Butte Miner, March 3, 1886, p. 1, lists “Annie C. Graves” as having mail at the post office. Annie may have lived in Lemhi County in 1884, then returned to Butte before she made a permanet home in Lemhi County.

[2] James A. Callahan’s Military Records and Obituary. See his story is a companion book at this website; Long Crossings, the Life of James A. Callahan, by S.E. Crie

[3] Territory of Montana: Silver Bow County Vital Records

[4] Edward Graves Obituary, see Chapter Twenty-Two.