Bowerman and the Men of Oregon Read online

  Was J. W. Chambers, the cause of all the uprooting, satisfied with his new life? It’s hard to know. A photo of J.W. in his thirties shows an unfurrowed brow and a coarse, dark beard that can’t obscure eyes and mouth brimming with wit. In another image, taken some twenty years later, the beard is white-streaked, the mouth rigid, and the eyes squint beneath a ridge of worry. The photos seem to be of different men.

  Twenty years on horseback will do that. But Chambers might also have been worn down by his failure to reunite his family. “Only once did J.W.’s wife come to Fossil country,” wrote Bowerman, and the opinion she recorded in her diary read, “A more godforsaken place does not exist on this earth.” She returned to the Tualatin Valley, where she died in 1890, at the age of eighty.

  But Fossil grew. It grew because Tom and Mary Jane filled it with seven children: After Annie and Will came Hattie, Mary, Lizzie, Maud, and Thomas Jr., the last born in 1886 when Mary Jane was forty. From 1879 to 1883 they lived in The Dalles so the kids could attend a better school. But then they returned to Fossil, built a two-story house (it took seven men to get Mary Jane’s grand piano into their upstairs bedroom), and never left again.

  Tom started the town’s first store and was elected mayor, justice of the peace, and county commissioner. “He gave a great deal to encourage the young people in the pursuit of healthful sports,” the Fossil Journal would write. “While not a churchman, he helped in a substantial way to build every church in town. But the organization he loved more than any other was the Fossil Band, which he helped start in 1885 and of which he has ever since been an enthusiastic member.”

  Fossil flourished, but for years it had no doctor. Instead it had Mary Jane Hoover. She delivered babies, set broken limbs, treated burns, sewed gashes, and pulled teeth. “My favorite story, told to me by my grandfather Will,” recalled Stiles, “had to do with a tooth extraction. She pulled the tooth all right and then cauterized the gum with a white-hot nail.”

  It’s hard not to see in both Tom and Mary Jane the templates for Bill Bowerman. Bill would have Tom’s openness to his community’s calls, the same musicality, the same ecumenical approach to matters of faith, never letting religion’s doctrine interfere with religion’s comfort. Like Mary Jane, he’d be good at adapting simple tools to sophisticated uses, especially in the healing arts.

  All the Hoover children had a vigor equal to the demands of ranch life. “Today we would refer to those girls as movers and shakers,” wrote Stiles. “The boys were gentle and soft-spoken. When they all left the ranch each morning for the one-room schoolhouse on the Busby place, astride their favorite horses, their father would tell them not to run the horses. And just as soon as he was out of sight one of the girls would shout ‘GO’ and it was a horse race.”

  Tom Hoover’s fear was only natural, because his father-in-law, still horse-besotted at fifty-nine, was killed by one. While racing with Indian friends, J.W. was thrown, suffered a broken neck, and died on July 11, 1877. He was buried on a westward-facing slope above the ranch where Tom and Mary Jane would raise their family. Bowerman, writing of his favorite ancestor’s departure, wished tranquility on J.W.’s restless spirit and deemed it “fulfilling that, having ridden into the western sunset at age fifteen, he should close his book of life on his last ride.”

  Tom and Mary Jane bore up and went on after J.W.’s death. Their fourth daughter, Elizabeth, was born on September 21, 1878, and so missed knowing her grandfather by fourteen months. Lizzie, as all would call her, would grow into the most beautiful and headstrong of the gallopers to school.

  Over the years, Mary Jane became smaller, wirier. Tom grew more florid. In a midlife photo, she is trim, her mouth straight and intelligent. Her liquid eyes have the power of an osprey’s, but their focus is inward, as if she is saddened by what she has seen, or is about to see. Perhaps the picture was taken after January 19, 1896, when she awoke to find Tom dying of what news accounts called “apoplexy” but was surely a stroke. He was fifty-six.

  The Condon Times’s obituary needed a full page to list all that Tom had done and been and founded and named. “The burial ceremony was beautiful in the extreme,” it said, “and visibly affected the great concourse of friends who were present.” The funeral oration was delivered by Judge H. H. Hendricks, a brother Knight of Pythias. “Our brother belonged to no church,” said Hendricks, who risked a little heresy in the Methodist-heavy town. “He professed no creed, but he had a faith in Him whose guiding hand is felt though unseen. To do good and be true, was his religion and there needs no other.”

  Lizzie Hoover was seventeen. She fought down as much of her own grief as she could to help her mother deal with the crush of the community’s condolences and to console her sister, Maud, thirteen, and brother, Tom, ten.

  Lizzie was a natural at both empathy and reaching out to hold her family close. Her spirits usually were so irrepressible that she seemed to physically vibrate with them. “I’ll always remember Lizzie’s hum, then chuckle, then hum,” wrote Stiles. The deductive reader, knowing that one of Mary Jane’s daughters will become Bill Bowerman’s mother, may safely presume her to be Lizzie.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lizzie and the Governor

  IN 1897, LIZZIE HOOVER FOLLOWED HER SISTER MARY TO OREGON AGRICULTURE College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis. She threw herself into her classes, in part because she loved them, in part because she disdained the idea of going to college to find a man. “Her husbandry studies,” Bill Bowerman would say, “were strictly animal.” She fought off homesickness in a way her sports-loving father would have approved, by starring on the Beavers’ women’s Pacific Conference championship basketball team.

  Lizzie took her degree in 1901 and returned to Fossil a strong, confident young woman whose next step was to find a man of substance who shared her ardor for the land and understood how inseparable she was from the burgeoning Hoover clan. So Lizzie took a back pew in the Methodist Church, studied the availables, and was unimpressed.

  But soon someone mentioned a young lawyer up in Condon who was making something of a name for himself. William Jay Bowerman Sr. was born in Hesper, Winnesheik County, Iowa, on August 15, 1876, the oldest son of Daniel and Lydia Bowerman. The family came west when he was sixteen, in 1893—not by wagon but by the Canadian Pacific Railway—settling in Marion County in the central Willamette Valley.

  Jay, as he was always known, was effortlessly quick, surged with ambition, and saw youth as no barrier. He whipped through Willamette University and took a law degree at twenty, before he was old enough to be admitted to the bar. He did farm work until he had aged enough to hang out his shingle in 1897 in Salem with John McCourt, a future Oregon Supreme Court justice. A year later, Jay enlisted in the Army, served in the short-lived Spanish-American War, and mustered out determined to live east of the Cascades.

  In 1899, at twenty-three, he moved to Condon, about twenty miles north of Fossil. (The town had no connection with Thomas Condon, but would be the boyhood home of double-Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling.) Within five years, Jay was enjoying a lucrative law practice, owned a 560-acre farm planted in wheat and barley, was brokering vast real estate deals, and was running for the state legislature. A photo from that time is striking for the expressionless poise of his face and for eyes so observant they seem to follow one’s every move. Jay’s younger sister Mary, equally exceptional, took her M.D. from Willamette in 1903, moved to Condon too, and became the first female doctor in Eastern Oregon.

  The juicy details are lost, but it couldn’t have taken Jay long to meet tall, athletic, clear-eyed, crooked-nosed Elizabeth Hoover after her return to Fossil. All who knew him had to be astounded by how young Jay was. At twenty-five, only two years older than Lizzie, he’d achieved riches and renown. If Lizzie hummed with energy, Jay Bowerman’s alpha-male presence more than matched it. He had a farm and a law practice. The legislature beckoned.

  Lizzie found that she had a charismatic suitor. “Jay Bowerman,” recalled at
torney Jim Castle, who would work with him in later years, “was a very handsome man. You would introduce someone to him and he had the faculty of saying the right complimentary thing and thereafter it was the most colorful talk you ever heard.” (“Colorful,” in the parlance of the day, meant “suggestive.”) Jay and Lizzie married in a rush in Fossil in 1903 and set up housekeeping in an imposing dwelling in Condon. There was no grand wedding trip because Jay had clients to serve and an election coming up. Their first child, Daniel Hoover Bowerman, was born January 21, 1906, in Condon. Mary Elizabeth (Beth) Bowerman would follow on February 26, 1908.

  Jay pronounced himself the world’s happiest man. Lizzie, as she had known she would, loved being a mother. She would have preferred to live in Fossil, within the bosom of the Hoover family, but the sheer joy of her babies made her content in nearby Condon.

  And Condon was where Jay was going places. At twenty-eight, in 1904, he was elected to the State Senate as a Republican and began a precipitous rise in that body, which met at the capitol in Salem, far across the Cascades. A Mr. Hofer, whom Jay trounced in a primary, told the Condon Times: “To Jay Bowerman, life is real, life is earnest. As a poor boy in Marion County, he was not hunting soft clerical jobs. He mauled rails and hauled cordwood for a living. He has hands and arms and a physique developed by hard labor. When he talks to a campaign audience, he strikes telling blows straight from the shoulder. In the legislature, he was always dead in earnest for or against a proposition.”

  At age thirty-two, in 1909, Jay was elected president of the State Senate. None of this was handed to him on a tea tray. In fact, Jay had ferocious enemies to the south, in the town founded by his in-laws.

  The differences between Condon and Fossil ranged from the geologic to the financial to the moral. Condon was surrounded by vistas of rippling wheat. Its grain elevators creaked with money. The masthead of the Condon Globe read “Condon: Largest Primary Grain Shipping Point in The United States.” Fossil, tucked among its buttes and creeks, was really suited only to growing hay, subsistence farming, and grazing. So Condon was the seat of prosperous Gilliam County and Fossil the seat of hardscrabble Wheeler County.

  Acrimony was fanned, as it so often is, by the hot breath of distilled spirits. Condon was not averse to a saloon. Fossil was intemperately for “temperance,” voting that no rum should pass its lips. Every Oregon city and county battled in those years over whether to be wet or dry.

  It was inevitable that Jay, a Condon wheat man, an attorney, a live-and-let-drink man, would be felt by many citizens of Fossil to be in league with the devil in all his guises. One accuser was James Stewart, editor of the Fossil Journal. On March 20, 1908, Stewart reported hearsay from a Mr. Searcy that Senator Bowerman had received the sum of $600 from the saloons of Condon for amending that city’s charter in such a way that if Gilliam County voted to go dry, the town would stay wet.

  However, as reported in the loyal Condon Times, the facts were these: Three years before, Jay Bowerman had been asked to draft the city’s new charter. He had done so. It was amended and approved by all of Condon’s citizens at a “mass meeting” and passed by the legislature exactly as amended, without a jot of Bowerman hanky-panky. Besides, every town’s charter had a clause like that, even Fossil’s.

  Finally, Searcy, who’d started the whole fuss, filed an affidavit with the Condon Times swearing that he had said nothing about Bowerman receiving any $600 for anything. The charges against Jay were amply rebutted, but he was not a man to suffer accusation coolly, or at all. His “dead-in-earnest, for-or-against” temperament moved him to overkill.

  On April 11, 1908, the Condon Globe (yes, the little town supported two argumentative papers) reported that “District Attorney A. J. Collier filed an . . . indictment, against James Stewart of the Fossil Journal for criminal libel alleged to have been committed against Jay Bowerman, [Collier’s] political boss and benefactor. A bond of $1500 has been fixed by Judge Littlefield.”

  The parties met in court two weeks later in Fossil. The Condon Times reported that the case was continued “over vigorous protest from Senator Bowerman who requested immediate trial,” adding snidely that Stewart had gotten the continuance “on the grounds that he had no evidence to back up his charges and where he is going to get such evidence in a month from now, or in six months from now is an open question.”

  What seems to have happened—since this was right before the 1908 Senate election, which Jay won—is that Jay settled for an apology and dropped the case. In subsequent elections, Jay’s opponents didn’t raise the topic of the incident against him. Apparently it wasn’t felt to be especially high-handed in the rough-and-tumble civic discourse of Eastern Oregon, the cultural compost upon which Bill Bowerman’s forebears flourished. (Indeed, Bill would inherit not only his father’s eyes, but also something of his reflexive urge to sue.)

  In 1909, Oregon Governor George E. Chamberlain resigned to take office as a newly elected US Senator. He was replaced as governor by Secretary of State Frank Benson who then fell deathly ill. Next in line for the governorship was the president of the State Senate, William Jay Bowerman Sr., who became the youngest man—at thirty-three years and ten months—ever to sit in the governor’s chair.

  For seven months, from June 17, 1910, to January 8, 1911, Jay ruled as if born to the job. Despite being essentially a caretaker, he chose the site of a big state hospital and developed a list of seven proposals for when he ran for election in his own right. Most of these were basic needs of the time, such as creating a state highway department and a central accounting system, but one was intriguing in that it might not be put forward by a twenty-first-century Republican. It was an employers’ liability act, to provide, in case of injury on the job, “for prompt and complete compensation to the employee without cost to him.” Jay was one of a classic Oregon breed, a moderate Republican, who well remembered his summers mauling rails.

  The acting governorship allowed Jay to expand his interests and contacts statewide. So, in early 1911, he moved the family and his law practice to Oregon’s largest city, Portland, to become partner in the firm of Fulton and Bowerman.

  Lizzie, hugely pregnant at the time, wasn’t exactly overjoyed by the move. She had never cared much for living in rented apartments in Salem when the legislature was in session (carousing legislators seemed wicked to her), and no Portland town house could equal the Hoover ranch back in Fossil. But she’d made a sacred promise to help her husband and she was sticking to it. She would cheerfully throw fine Sunday dinners for visiting politicos and be gracious to all, whether statesman or hack. This would take a certain self-discipline, but she was equal to that. The pioneer principle was that everyone pulls his or her weight. That’s what’s meant by character.

  Thus it was that the birth of their twins, Thomas Benton Bowerman and William Jay Bowerman Jr., who arrived in Portland on February 19, 1911, flooded her with reassurance. The twins would be a perfect distraction from the world of logrolling and speechifying and plotting campaigns. The twins would be a worthy mother’s parallel to Jay’s success.

  In the fall of 1910, Acting Governor Jay Bowerman ran for the governorship against Oswald West, a Democrat from Astoria, whom Jay had known since they were stripling lawyers in Salem in 1897. After receiving the Republican nomination, Jay returned to Condon and a rapturous welcome. “As the train pulled into the station,” said the Condon Times, “the racket was deafening. Mr. Bowerman, accompanied by his mother and Mrs. Bowerman, was driven down Main Street, being lustily cheered as the big car passed each corner.”

  In later life, West (who is honored in Oregon for abolishing the death penalty and preserving the state’s coastline by declaring the beaches highways) would say the policy differences between the candidates amounted to little more than West being a smoker and Jay a chewer. But the Condon Times of November 5, 1910, evoking Eastern Oregon’s belief that to the rest of the state it might as well be Manitoba, commanded its readers: “Go to the polls and cast your
vote for the man from the wheat fields and bunch grass. Mr. Bowerman is a man of ability, a man of brains and an American. Mr. West is a light weight, a man chosen by a political machine and a Canadian. Which do you want?”

  Jay carried the East but West won the race by about 3,000 votes. West would say, “Turned out there were a few more smokers than chewers” and go on to adopt almost all of Jay’s proposed improvements.

  The Condon Times was crushed, noting, “The defeat of the head of the Republican party was a complete surprise, not only to the Republicans, but to the Democrats themselves. Practically all the rest of the Republican ticket was elected.”

  The paper knew why Jay had lost, but could hardly mention it in that unforgiving era. West’s victory was due to rumors that Jay was divorcing Lizzie.

  Over the years, Jay had grown close to his young aide in the Senate, Wayfe Hockett, the daughter of a Grants Pass banker. Jay taught her the law and she passed the bar on the strength of his lessons. Lizzie was spending more and more time at home. “So the love match was made sitting there in the legislature,” Barbara Bowerman would say, not unkindly, many years later. “When his wife didn’t want to be there, here was someone who adored him.”

  Jay and Wayfe were so open about their affection that when he was elevated to the acting governorship, judiciary officials had asked Wayfe, not Lizzie, to accompany him to the swearing-in ceremony. Wayfe had declined because Jay had not yet obtained his divorce, and wouldn’t until 1913. But so many knew the truth that a whispering campaign by the Democratic machine was lethal. “It was the dirtiest election,” Wayfe told Barbara long afterward.

  Lizzie didn’t contest the divorce, but her resentment would not abate. She knew she’d kept her end of the deal, had sacrificed her wishes to his ambition. In return, she felt that Jay, that congenital luster after power and ownership and pleasure, had cared to sacrifice nothing. For the rest of her life, when Lizzie spoke of the split or of Jay’s betrayal, it was always in terms of deceit, as in “That man never told the truth in his life.”