History Snoopin': May 2019

27 May 2019

History Snoopin': Memorial Day--1919

Memorial Day, 1919

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, May 27th 2019

“This is not a day of the glorification of war, but a solemn recognition of the supreme sacrifice and terrible cost of war.”

The Rev. Myron Boozer, pastor of Medford Presbyterian Church, had begun his Memorial Day address on a day the Mail Tribune called “the most notable Memorial Day observance and the most deeply sentimental in its significance in the history of Medford.”

Friday, May 30, 1919, marked the first Memorial Day observance since the Nov. 11 Armistice of the previous year. Although the Armistice had ended fighting during WWI, it would still be almost another month before the Treaty of Versailles would formally end the “war to end war.”

The day began in Library Park (today’s Alba Park) with school children, Red Cross women dressed in white uniforms, and hundreds of residents gathering in front of the Carnegie Library. They circled around a floral column dedicated to the 40 local men who had died in the name of freedom and democracy.

Nearly 20 feet high, the patriotic memorial was fashioned from thousands of local flowers by the women of the Red Cross. Red roses were woven into its base, white roses in its middle, and clusters of blue “snakeheads” (Fritillaria) that had been hand-gathered from Jackson County forests, were molded into a tall shaft at its top. Attached on all sides were the names of the area’s fallen soldiers.

A bugle sounded and Junior Red Cross members, accompanied by the high school band, sang “Truth Is Marching On,” while tossing bouquets of red roses at the memorial’s base.

Major Robert Clancy, a Medford physician, gave a patriotic address from the library step, and then led the group in the singing of “America.”

A rifle squad from the local National Guard fired a salute to the war dead, followed by a bugler blowing “Taps.”

The gathering formed a column that included veterans of previous wars and was led by surviving veterans of the Civil War. They marched down Main Street to the bridge across Bear Creek, following the martial tunes played by the high school band.

On the bridge, to honor fallen Marines and Navy fighters, the Junior Red Cross and the women of the Red Cross dropped roses down to the waters of the creek, all the while singing, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”

After the National Guard’s rifle squad fired another salute, the crowd entered the nearby Page Theater for a presentation dedicated to those who had died in the Civil War. (The Page Theater was destroyed in a 1923 fire. A corner of the five-story building stood where a parking lot on the south side of Main Street stands today.)

The Rev. Boozer stood on a stage patriotically decorated with flags, bunting and flowers. His address was called the most important of the day.

“We are face to face with problems that war can never solve,” he said. “The blood of our heroic dead cries aloud from every field of battle, and from every grave on home or foreign soil; for the recruiting of a vast army of great hearts dedicated to the unfinished tasks they have bequeathed to us.”

Memorial Day 1919 ended with flowers lovingly placed on the graves of soldiers and sailors.

Writer Bill Miller is the author of “Forgotten Voices of WWI,” a different look at the war to end war. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.

https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/memorial-day-1919

20 May 2019

Forgotten Voices of WWI: Roland Root Speers - American Volunteer Ambulance Corps in WWI France

1915 - American Roland Speers- serving France in the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps

Roland Root Speers

(16 October 1895 – 29 November 1970)

We have now been moved to the far-away front. The work and accommodations here are the best yet, not like those in the little village where we were in “repose.” There the rats galloped up and down and around our beds, until we were forced to turn our flashlights on at intervals and bombard them with shoes and cakes of soap. I never saw such big rats.

The only apparent danger here is from gas, and all the schoolchildren as well as grandfathers carry gas masks slung over their shoulders.

The horror, the intensity and gravity of trench warfare is impossible to absorb from books or letters. I realized this when I got here. Things that impressed me were the ever-whispered conversations and the air of alertness and expectancy as if the nerves were being strained to catch the slightest sound. There seemed to be a deathly stillness. Both the men and dogs seemed to be bundles of nerves. I stooped to pat a dog in one of the dugouts that was unaware of my intention, and as soon as my hand touched him, he retired as though a hot iron had seared him.

It is the terrific explosions that wreck the nerves.

Still—in my idle moments—I can conjure up to memory those deep, dark caves where men crouch like animals; where breeding, manners, home, and the niceties of life seem ages away. I can see the stacked rifles; the well-placed machine guns, the reservoirs of wicked grenades placed so the poilus [a French soldier] can reach them as they come up out of their foul-aired caves—and always, I see the utter desolation, the withered vegetation, and the horrible churned and rechurned chaos of “No Man’s Land.”

Forgotten Voices of WWI

Hathaway Jones: Southern Oregon's Favorite Storyteller

Telling tall tales in the Siskiyous

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, May 20th 2019

When a man on a mule who looks like Groucho Marx wearing a pith helmet rides by, you just have to believe the man’s got a story to tell.

That would be Hathaway Jones. He could spin 1,000 tales at the drop of a lip and you never had to ask him.

Some called him a colorful character, a true wit. Others said he was the biggest liar Oregon had ever seen.

Born in 1871 on the family’s land claim just north of Roseburg, Ivan Hathaway Jones

Hathaway Jones

inherited his tall-tale ability from his father and grandfather, but Hathaway would outclass them both.

Nearly 50 of the Jones boys and girls had crossed the prairie in 1852 from Indiana. Heading the wagon column was Captain Jacob Jones, Hathaway’s great-grandfather. Jacob bought an interest in a flour mill, and before he died in 1865 he passed it on to his son, Isaac.

Isaac, better known as Ike, liked to say he came to Siskiyou Mountains when all the trees were just tiny saplings and the Rogue River was nothing but a crack through the rocks.

Ike claimed that his son, William, was suckled by a cougar and would only talk to cougars until he was 9 years old.

William’s favorite story was the time his son, Hathaway, was looking for gold and found a 6-inch-long nugget.

“Look what I found, Dad!” Hathaway said proudly.

William turned, spit out a chaw, and said, “Mighty fine hunk of ore son, but we’re just too far from the railroad.”

By the mid 1890s, William had turned miner, sold the flour mill, and moved with his family into the Curry County wilderness along the Rogue River, just about 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

In March 1898, Hathaway began his lifelong career — mail carrier along the Rogue River. With just mules to talk to as he made his way over the perilous trails that were barely etched into the canyon walls, Hathaway had plenty of time to cook up some outrageous yarns.

Hathaway Jones Delivers Mail on the Rogue River

Old Betsy, his trusty rifle, was one of his favorites. Loaded with special black powder cartridges, he said, she fired the slowest bullets anyone ever saw. Why, maybe you remember the honking goose he shot. It was so high in the sky it took all afternoon to finally hit the dang thing.

Then there was that deer, two miles away, shot with his last bullet. By the time Hathaway reached the animal he realized the deer had run into that very same bullet 16 times, just trying to escape.

Sometimes he loaded Old Betsy with salted bullets, explaining, “That danged rifle kills at such a distance that if I didn’t salt them bullets, especially in warm weather, the meat would spoil with age before I could get to it.”

Hathaway Jones told his last story in August 1937. In the middle of the night, his riderless horse led a team of five pack mules into Marial, the old post office in Curry County. Hathaway had fallen off the trail and onto a sharp rock.

“He soaked up the flavor of the pines,” said a reporter. “When he sat across from a campfire, he always had a story to tell. We will miss him.”

Writer Bill Miller is the author of “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.

https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/telling-tall-tales-in-the-siskiyous