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Gov. Frank Steunenberg
JTR Collection |
From
Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas:
"The night before the governor's walk had witnessed the season's
grandest dinner party, cohosted by Caldwell's social arbiter, Queen
Carrie Blatchley;
William Judson Boone;
and their spouses for a group of refined young couples, including two
attorneys, an insurance agent, a pastor, and the manager of a lumber
company. 'Very pleasant,' Boone recorded in his diary. 'Fine time.'"
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| William J. Boone |
"Indeed,
to Boone, his guests, and many others, that winter in Caldwell seemed a
fine time and place to be alive. Despite its early dependency, there
lingered in town a fragile sense of autonomy—the notion that its
citizens controlled their own destiny...."
"It began to snow just before dawn, chalky flakes tumbling through
the hush of the sleeping town, quilting the pastures, tracing fence
rails and porch posts along the dusky lanes. In the livery stables that
lined Indian Creek, dray horses and fancy pacers, shifting in their
stalls, nickered into the pale light. A chill north wind muttered down
Kimball Avenue, rattling the windows of feed stores and dry goods
emporia, still festooned for the holidays with boughs of holly, chains
of popcorn and cranberries. Off to the east, behind the whitening knob
of Squaw Butte, rose the wail of the Union Pacific's morning train from
Boise, due into the Caldwell depot at 6:35 with its load of drowsy ranch
hands and bowler-hatted drummers."
"Sounding up the
slope of
Dearborn Street into Caldwell's jaunty new subdivision of Washington
Heights, the whistle brought an unwelcome summons to the former governor
of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, as he lay abed that final Saturday of
1905. The governor—as he was still known, five years out of office—had
spent a bad night, thrashing for hours in sleepless foreboding. Now
while the snow piled up beneath his cottonwoods, he burrowed deeper
under the bedclothes."
"One of his favorite boyhood songs had
evoked just such a moment: Oh, it's nice to get up in the morning, when
the sun begins to shine / At four, or five, or six o'clock in the good
old summertime / But when the snow is a-snowing and it's murky overhead /
Oh, it's nice to get up in the morning, but it's nicer to lie in bed!'
The Steunenbergs, though, were sturdy Hollanders imbued with a
Protestant work ethic, and it offended the governor's temperament to
idle away even a weekend morning. So he hauled himself out of bed and
put on his favorite six-dollar shirt with its flowered design. When it
had shrunk so much he couldn't fasten the collar, his sister Jo, in her
motherly fashion, had cut a chunk out of the tail to expand the chest.
She was still looking for matching material to repair the back, but the
governor liked the cheerful old shirt so well he donned it that morning
anyway, short tail and all. Then he went down to the kitchen and built a
coal fire in the great iron stove."
"When his wife, Belle, joined him, she remarked that
he seemed ill at ease. The good and evil spirits were calling me all
night long,' said the
governor, who sat for a time with his face buried in his hands."
"'Please do not resist the good spirits, Papa,' his wife admonished. A
devout Seventh-Day Adventist, Belle persuaded her husband, who generally
eschewed such rituals, to kneel on the kitchen floor and join her in
reading several passages from Scripture. Then they sang Annie Hawks's
fervent hymn:
I need thee, O, I need thee!
Every hour I need Thee;
O, bless me now, My Savior!
I come to Thee.
"When
their devotionals were done, Frank set out across the barnyard—joined
by his white English bulldog, Jumbo—to milk his cows and feed
his chickens, goats, and hogs."
"The family's eccentric
gray-and-white edifice, a hybrid of Queen Anne and American Colonial
styles, bristled with gables, porches, columns, and chimneys. It was
barely seven-eighths of a mile from Caldwell's center, but the governor,
with one young hand to help him, maintained a working farm on the two
and a half acres, replete with barn, windmill, well, pasture, livestock
pens, and apple and pear trees mixed among the sheltering cottonwoods."
"After feeding his stock, he turned toward the house for breakfast with
Belle and the children -- Julian, nineteen, on Christmas vacation from
the Adventists' Walla Walla College in Washington State; Frances,
thirteen; Frank Junior, five; and eight-month-old Edna, an orphan the
Steunenbergs had adopted that year -- as well as Will Keppel, Belle's
brother, who was staying with them for a time while working at the
family bank.
Their hired girl, Rose Flora,
served up the austere
breakfast prescribed by Adventists: wheat cereal, stewed fruit, perhaps
an unbuttered slice of oatmeal bread (the sect believed that butter—like
eggs, bacon, other meats, coffee, and tea—stimulated the 'animal
passions')."
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| Julian (JTR Collection) |
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| Frank W. & Frances (Martyr of ID) |
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| Edna (JTR copy) |
"Had the governor allowed his melancholy to infect
the breakfast table that morning, it would have been out of character.
With his children -- on whom he doted—he generally affected a puckish
humor, spiced with sly doggerel, such as the verse he'd composed a year
earlier for his daughter: 'Frances had a little watch / She swallowed
it one day / Her mother gave her castor oil / To help her pass the time
away.'"
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AK at the back window.
Not sure of the other. (JTR Collection) |
"After breakfast came a phone call from his younger
brother Albert --universally known as A.K. -- the most entrepreneurial
of the six Steunenberg brothers and cashier of the
Caldwell Banking and Trust Company,
of which Frank was president. An important matter awaited the
governor's attention, A.K. said: Edward J. Dockery, a Boise lawyer,
a former Democratic state chairman, and now a business associate of the
Steunenbergs, would be arriving in Caldwell later that day and expected
to meet them at the bank. No, Frank said, he wasn't in the right frame
of mind for such a meeting. He asked A.K. to tell Dockery he'd see him
in Boise next week."
"In days to come, the governor's
disinclination to do business that day was much remarked. Some said it
was the weather, which by late morning had turned nasty, four inches of
snow driven by blustery winds drifting along the roadways, temperatures
plummeting toward zero. But Frank Steunenberg was still young
(forty-four years old), husky (six foot two, 235 pounds), and healthy
(an avid hiker and camper who scorned the big eastern cities, with their
creature comforts, their smoke, noise, and dirt)—in short, not a man
likely to be intimidated by a little Idaho snowstorm."
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| NY Canal would flow into Lake Lowell (JTR Collection) |
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"Others said his reclusiveness that day was merely a bow toward Belle's Sabbath,
which lasted from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Although Frank
was by no means an Adventist, some believed that he was gradually
accommodating himself to his wife's recent conversion. Others who knew
him well insisted he was profoundly skeptical of Belle's piety and would
never have canceled a meeting on religious grounds. He might well have
been weary. For only the day before he'd returned from a strenuous trip
-- by train, buggy, and horseback -- to his sheep ranch near Bliss, a
hundred miles to the southeast.
With his business associate, James H. 'Harry' Lowell, he'd also inspected an irrigation project along the Wood River. A. K. Steunenberg -- his brother's confidant -- believed there
was a quite different explanation for Frank's behavior that day. Later
he told reporters the governor must have received a warning late in the
week, which would account for his "unusual" manner. On Friday afternoon
at the bank, he'd walked the floor with a 'meditative and troubled
expression' on his face."
"Most of the day, as
wind-driven snow hissed at the windowpanes, the governor read and wrote
in his study. At. four o'clock he put on his overcoat, a slouch hat and
galoshes, but no necktie: he was known throughout the state for his
stubborn refusal to throttle himself with one of those slippery eastern
doo-hickey's. Some said the habit began in the governor's youth when he
was too indigent to afford a tie. In any case, for the rest of his life
he'd button the shirt around his neck, leaving the uncovered brass
collar button to glint like a gold coin at his throat."
"People
loved to speculate on his eccentricity. 'His friends have exhausted all
their persuasive powers on him,' said the populist James Sovereign.
'Newspapers have raked him fore and aft with editorial batteries,
theatrical companies have held him up to laughter and ridicule, he has
become the basis of standing jokes in bar-room gossip and sewing
circles, orators have plead (
sic) with him, doctors have
prescribed for him and politicians have lied for him, but all to no
avail.' Indeed a fashionable Washington, D.C., hotel had once refused to
serve him because he wore no tie, an exclusion that he bore with
'magnanimous mien.' A bemused Wall Streeter remembered him, one one of
his excursions East, as a rugged giant who wore a bearskin coat flapping
over a collarless shirt."
"Some Idahoans thought he
carried sartorial informality a bit too far. On the day he was nominated
for governor, he was said to have appeared at the Democratic convention
lacking not only a necktie but a collar, with trousers so short they
showed of his 'cheap socks' and a sack coat so skimpy as not to exclude
from view the seat of his pants.'"
"On that snowy night
of the governor's walk, Caldwell looked for all the world like the
quintessential ninetieth-century American community, sufficient unto
itself, proof against an uncaring world."
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| Exploded gate detail. (JTR Collection) |
"Entering
Sixteenth Avenue, he could see the lamplight burning behind the columns
of his front porch, the warm glow filtering through the lace curtains
of his living room, where minutes before Belle and their two youngest
children had knelt at their evening prayers. He reached down and pulled
the wooden slide that opened the gate leading to his side door. As he
turned to close it, an explosion split the evening calm, demolishing the
gate, the eight-inch gatepost, and nearby fencing, splintering yards of
boardwalk scooping a shallow, oval hole in the frozen ground, and
hurling the governor ten feet into his yard."
"At
first, Belle thought the potbelly stove had exploded. But
thirteen-year-old Francis, who was especially close to her father, had
been eagerly glancing out the window, impatient for his arrival. Having
seen the flash by the gate and watched Frank fall, she was at his side
in a few seconds, joined almost immediately by Belle. For one terrible
moment, mother and daughter stared in blank incomprehension at the
governor, sprawled on his back, naked from the waist down, blood seeping
from his mangled legs, staining the snow an ugly pink."
"The
Reverend Mr. Boone and his wife had been entertaining their closest
friends, the Blatchleys,when they heard a "terrific" noise. They thought
something had fallen on the roof."
"Julian Steunenberg (
my grandfather) and Will Keppel (
nephew of Belle/son of her brother Edward Keppel)
came running. A sturdy youth with a shock of blond hair, strikingly
like his father in face and figure, Julian had been particularly close
to the governor. He and Will had been strolling two blocks behind him
when they felt the explosion, then dashed with pounding hearts to
Frank's side, where they were quickly joined by Garrit Van Wyngarden,
the governor's brother-in-law, who lived two blocks west on Dearborn.
Together the trio tried to lift the grievously wounded man, but as they
did the flesh on his legs simply gave way. Finally, someone got a
blanket, into which they paced the governor, managing to carry him that
way into the house and lay him on a bed in his daughter's downstairs
bedroom."
"
Will Steunenberg
had just eaten supper and was back at his store arranging a display of
boots when the concussion spilled them on the floor. A minute later,
Ralph Oates rushed in to say there'd been an explosion at Frank's
house...When he reached the house, his brother had already been moved
inside. Belle was lighting kerosene lamps to replace the electric ones,
for the neighborhood's electric power had been knocked out by the blast.
Windows on the north and west side of the house had been shattered, as
had those in other houses for blocs around. Shards of glass littered the
floors. A huge clock had toppled from its shelf, striking five-year-old
Frank Junior, who'd been lying on the leather couch below."
"When
Will entered the front bedroom, it was 'horrible': the governor
writhing on the bed, his right arm hanging by a few shreds, his right
leg mangled, both legs broken at the ankles. He kept asking to have his
legs rubbed."
"Three of the town's doctors-John Grue, W.E. Waldrop, and John A. Myer—had arrived. There was nothing they could do."
"Just
past 7:30 p.m., he gasped three or four times, like a man trying to
catch his breath, and muttered something unintelligible. As Will leaned
closer, trying to hear those last syllables, the governor sank back and
died. "
"'Frank died in my arms', Will wrote a sister
in Iowa, 'and I hope the fellow that killed him will die in my arms,
only in a different manner.'" —
Big Trouble - A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America by J. Anthony Lukas
A desolate looking Canyon Hill in early 1906.
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| Governor Steunenberg in clay |
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Friday, November 5, 2010
Original clay sculpture of Governor Steunenberg's statue
Friday, May 6, 2011
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