Life in a Railroad Town
By
Jill Evans, Administrator of the Stumptown Historical
Society
Good times were
usually noisy, sometimes rowdy, occasionally boisterous.
Probably they needed to be. Life was hard, as Mrs.
Motichka makes clear, and it was violent.
The railroad had brought roustabouts,
hold-up men, thieves and drunkards to town. There were
almost daily robberies. Drunkenness on the downtown
streets was commonplace. Accidents on the railroad made
injury frequent and death no stranger. There was also
hunting accidents and drownings. There was a murder or
two, Smallpox, typhoid, and flu epidemics were
feared-and fearful. Forest fire was a summertime danger,
and other fires a winter hazard. Day-to-day living was
never really safe, and women worried or put their trust
in God.
There have been only two hangings in Flathead County and
neither crime occurred in Whitefish. They were both
known about in Whitefish, though, and talked about
there.
Calvin J. Christie, alias Charles J. Black, was hanged
December 21, 1894, for the murder of Mrs. Lena
Cunningham the preceding April 28 in the woods north of
Columbia Falls.
Christie had had a long life of crime under several
aliases in St., Paul and elsewhere, and had lived in
Columbia Falls as a painter under the name of Black.
Mrs. Cunningham was a reputable housewife, slain for no
known reason while walking home. The crime frightened
other women.
Fred LeBeau was hanged in 1909 for the Yoakim murders in
nearby Fortine, west of Whitefish. When Riley and Frank
Yoakim were found dead in June, 1908, it was supposed
that the son had killed his 70-yar-old father and then
committed suicide. Joseph Hobbins came forth with other
information, saying that he had a certain LeBeau had
gone to the Yoakum cabin together, asking for food, and
that after he had left, LeBeau had killed both men.
LeBeau was hanged, Hobbins was implicated with LeBeau
and given life imprisonment. Later he was released.
There were other murders. In November 1907, James Hines,
who had worked in the extra gang at Essex, cashed his
checks in Whitefish and next day was found dead on the
railroad tracks, where a train ran over both legs.
In October, 1908, Brakeman Ray G. Gregory of Whitefish,
while on his run from Cutbank to Whitefish, was shot by
a tramp; he died the next week of his injuries. The same
month Arthur W. Livingstone, a young man married only a
little over a year and with a small baby attempted to
kill his mother-in-law and injured his wife before he
committed suicide near the bridge at the Somers mill on
Whitefish Lake. Most Whitefish crime fell short of
murder, but there are frequent Pilot references to these
lesser crimes. Three items might be call typical:
January 14, 1905: “Constables O’Brien and Hofman this
week did a good turn for Whitefish, They rounded up a
bunch of toughs and gave them the privilege of leaving
town or going to jail. In the gang was Omaha Jack. They
all concluded to leave except Chub Casey. O’Brien pulled
him in Thursday and Justice Reed sent him to county jail
for 30 days.”
May, 1906” “That Whitefish is infested by a gang of
thieves, hold-up men, and hoodlums who should be jailed,
if possible, or run out of town if necessary, has been
shown this week on a number of occasions. Sunday night
was particularly productive of law-breaking acts, a
hold-up and two robberies occurring on this night, in
addition to the usual drunkenness, carousing, and
yelling, which has come to be a regular thing…Ike L.
Freudenthal last week installed a handsome new safe in
his business house.”
July 5, 1907: “Several fights during the past week have
helped to keep up the reputation of ‘Hell Roarin’
Avenue.” (Central Avenue, we assume.)
One of the best-known, biggest, and most interesting
robberies involving Whitefish, as well as other Flathead
law officials, occurred when the Great Northern Oriental
Ltd, was robbed near Rondo in Lincoln County in
September, 1907, by Charles McDonald and George
Frankhouser. Forty thousand dollars was taken.
Frankhouser was sent to Leavenworth, where he died in
1920, but McDonald escaped after a Helena jail break in
1909.
Railroad robberies occurred up and down the line and
were sometimes serious, like that at Rondo, sometimes a
bit on the humorous side. The big depot robbery in
Whitefish itself was of the latter variety.
In June, 1904, the townspeople were awakened one night
by loud explosions and immediately rushed in the
direction of the racket to the railroad. There they
found a blown safe on the platform, which had a hole in
it, broken windows in the shack that was then the depot,
and scattered currency being picked up by assorted
trainmen and citizens. Burglars, plainly green at the
business, had broken into the depot through J. S.
Babcock’s window, removed the outer door of the safe,
and then carried the safe to the platform, where they
blew it open. Scared off by the blast, the robbers left
the money and a gold watch behind. Fortunately a
railroad car loaded with “giant powder” that had stood
at the depot the previous day had been removed before
the robbery. Otherwise the town would have been blown
sky-high.
Note: The quoted
material is taken from
Stump Town to Ski Town, by Betty Schafer and
Mable Engelter, written in 1972 and reprinted by the
Stumptown Historical Society in 2003. It is available
for sale in the Whitefish Museum located in the Train
Depot.
|
