Old Missoula

Boyd History (1)    ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ ✳ April 30, 2016

William Boyd Death & Funeral Notices

Missoula, Montana

(With Comments & Supplemental Information)

Death: Sunday, 24 May 1942

Funeral: Wednesday, 27 May 1942

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© Terrence B. Kayes

Included below are transcriptions of the newspaper obituary and funeral notice for William Boyd that are printed as they were published, including any errors in fact, syntax, grammar, spelling, or typography. Format and font type and size are enlarged for better readability.  Following the obituary and the funeral notice are some comments and supplemental information about William Boyd, including about how and when he got to Montana from Michigan, and to there from Ontario, his timber-cutting and ranching activities, and his many friends.

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Obituary

The Daily Missoulian

Volume LXX. Number 26. Page 10.

MISSOULA, MONTANA, TUESDAY MORNING, MAY 26, 1942.

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William Boyd Taken at Home

Rites Tomorrow

Prominent Livestock and Logging Man Succumbs at Family Residence

Requiem high mass will be celebrated Wednesday for William Boyd, 81, a resident of Montana for 58 years and prominent in logging and livestock enterprises throughout that time. Mr. Boyd died late Sunday night at the family residence, 340 South Third street west.

The services will be in St. Anthony’s church, with Very Rev. D. P. Meade officiating. Burial will be in St. Mary’s cemetery.

Rosary will be recited this evening at 7 o’clock in the church, with Lucy’s funeral home in charge of arrangements.

Pallbearers will be Scotty Brown, Fred Baird, Tom Geary, Gus Hoepfner, Lou Parker and Edward Kelly.

Honorary pallbearers will be George Fox, C. H. McLeod, E. R. Kilburn, R. G. Dixon, Frank Nelson, Harry L. Shapard, W. C. Lubrecht, Charles Hart, William Morris, John Swanson, George Warner, and Fred Watson.

Mr. Boyd, native of Canada, was born May 11, 1861, at Vankleek Hill, Canada, where he made his home until 18 years of age. At that period in his life he went to Alpine, Mich., where he eventually became engaged in the logging business.

Mr. Boyd’s Montana connections started in 1884, when he came from Michigan to Butte and entered the logging and lumbering business which he followed in Western Montana. He became a logging and lumbering contractor and at one time was superintendent of the logging operations for A. C. M. company at Seeley lake [A. C. M. referring to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company].

However, Mr. Boyd from the date of his entrance into Montana was interested in farming and livestock. In 1895 he followed his inclination and acquired farm property near Ovando in the Blackfoot valley, where he engaged in the livestock industry and had been in it continuously since. He extended his ranch holdings in Missoula and extended his ranch holdings in Powell counties and was in the horse, cattle and sheep business. He was one of the largest independent ranchers of Western Montana. While he always maintained his ranch home, for years he has had a town home in Missoula. Mr. Boyd gained a statewide reputation for the quality of the horses, cattle and sheep he raised.

Mr. Boyd was married at Deer Lodge, August 20, 1890 to Miss Minnie E. Atkinson, and two years ago they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

Mr. Boyd has been an intimate friend of Scotty Brown since Mr. Brown came into the country in 1911 and Mr. Brown reported yesterday that Mr. Boyd was one of the state’s most substantial independent ranchers.

Mr. Boyd is survived by his widow. Other survivors are two sons, Clifford F. Boyd and William A. Boyd, both of Ovando, Mrs. H. M. Dengler, Washington, D. C.; Mrs. Eva M. Paul, Ovando, Mrs. Virgil Gibson, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and Miss Dorothy Boyd, Missoula. There are seven grandchildren, one great-grandchild; a brother, Jack Boyd, in Los Angeles and a sister, Mrs. James Reasbeck, at Cancleek [sic] Hill, Canada. The widow and the six children were at the bedside when the end came. Mrs. Dengler, the daughter in Washington, D. C., who had started on a western trip, was called to Missoula and arrived here before the end came.

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Funeral Notice

The Daily Missoulian

Volume LXX. Number 27. Page 12.

MISSOULA, MONTANA, WEDNESDAY MORNING, MAY 27, 1942.

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Boyd Funeral Will Be Today at 11:30

Requiem high mass for William Boyd, 81, prominent stockman and timber operator who died Sunday night at the family residence, 340 South Third street west, will be celebrated this morning at 11:30 o’clock at St. Abthony’s [sic] Catholic church, with Very Rev. D. P. Meade officiating.

The rosary was recited at 7:00 o’clock Tuesday evening at the church.

Burial will be in St. Mary’s cemetery. The body was lying in state at the Lucy funeral home, where it will remain until the funeral hour.

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Comments & Supplemental Information

1. I first saw William Boyd’s obituary as a newspaper clipping among the memorabilia of my mother, Mary Isabell Boyd Kayes, a daughter of William’s fourth younger brother, Alexander James Boyd, who was born at Vankleek Hill in 1869. Based on what she told me, a Montana relative had mailed the clipping to her, sometime very soon after her Uncle Bill had died in May 1942—while she was living and working in Baltimore, Maryland, while my father was going to Engineers Officers Candidate School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. In her reminisces over the years about the Boyd brothers, my mother frequently emphasized to me how close the brothers were to each other and their mother and how much they worked and coordinated with each other throughout much of their lives, especially in their younger years.

In 1886, her father, Alexander (Alex), at age 16 traveled directly to Butte, Montana with his 9-month older brother, David Adam Boyd— their fare having been paid by their older brothers, William, Charles and John, who had been there since 1883-84. Having finished their 6-7 year apprenticeships as blacksmiths in Canada, Alex and David joined their older brothers, who had been active at timber and cord- wood cutting and hauling in Butte and the country around it. There, all five brothers labored to build the family’s fortunes and in 1888 brought their mother Mary Anne (nee Sharpe) Boyd from Vankleek Hill to Montana, probably by train.

2. Before 2015, I did not know the source of the newspaper clipping my mother had received about her uncle’s death in 1942, because it included the text only and no information as to source. To help solve this mystery, plus some others, in April 2015 I engaged the services of Rita Gibson in Helena, Montana to find the obituary, which I had long suspected had been published by The Daily Missoulian. Rita is a native of Montana, an honors graduate of the University of Montana, with bachelor’s degrees in history and in music education, and is on the Montana Historical Society’s list of ‘Independent Researchers for Hire.’ She soon found the obituary, and confirmed it had been in The Daily Missoulian. Soon after, at my request, she searched and learned that the obituary had not been published in the newspapers of Philipsburg, Anaconda, Deer Lodge, or Great Falls, in the 2 weeks following William Boyd’s death. I have digital copies of the obituary and the funeral notice, which Rita sent me.

3. Assuming the above date of birth and age information for William Boyd are correct, then he (almost certainly accompanied by his first younger brother Charles and possibly his third younger brother John) departed their home near Vankleek Hill, Township of West Hawesbury, United Counties of Prescott and Russell, Dominion of Canada, in 1879 or the spring of 1880. From there, he almost certainly made his way west, working at timber-cutting and river-driving camps along the St. Lawrence River Valley, first to Lake Ontario, probably overland to the southern end of Lake Huron while in Ontario, then crossing over into Michigan. In the 1870s and 1880s, the eastern Great Lakes region of Ontario and State of Michigan were the lead timber-harvesting areas of their nations. Over 50 percent of the residents of Michigan at that time had come there from Canada drawn by money and jobs.

(There is good reason to think from family lore and Canadian census notes that William and Charles probably made seasonal sojourns into the Great Lakes region to earn money at timber-cutting jobs, before 1879. According to one source, Charles first entered the U.S. in 1878. Young men ranging great distances for seasonal work were common in the Great Lakes region during that period.)

4. Alpine, Michigan was, and still is, Alpine Township, a semi-rural population center, the southern boundary of which is very near the City of Grand Rapids, which is on the Grand River. The center of the township is roughly 6 miles north-northwest of the center of Grand Rapids. Alpine Township, which is in Kent County, has its own local government and no incorporated municipalities within it. Significant information exists on the history of the township and its role in the regional lumber industry. There appears to have been at least one Boyd family among the early settlers of the township, which had a Boyd schoolhouse in the early years. This raises the possibility the Boyd brothers went to Alpine Township because they had relatives there, which if true would point to a possible pattern of Boyd family chain migration, a common feature in most human migrations.

The Grand River Valley, especially in the Grand Rapids vicinity, was one of the most productive timber cutting and lumbering regions in North America from the 1860s to the close of the 19th century. The Grand Rapids area was, and still is, a major furniture manufacturing center. In late-July 1883, one of the largest log jams ever recorded occurred in the Grand River in the Grand Rapids vicinity, along with serious flooding and an outbreak of malaria. It would have been not long after this historic log jam that William and his brothers Charles and John left Michigan for Montana—not necessarily all at the same time. (The known evidence suggests Charles left first, in 1883.)

There is a large amount of information in print and online about the history of the Grand Rapids area and its lumber industry in the 19th century. Many lumbermen in Michigan in 1883-84 were attracted to Montana by the very rapidly-expanding copper mining and smelting industry, the building of the giant smelting ‘works’ and the company town at Anaconda, and ongoing construction of the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad and an ever expanding network of regional lines, together all of which required huge amounts of cut timber for ties, trestles and other structures, and cordwood for fuel. Supplying this required thousands of sawyers, lumbermen and wood choppers, as well as teamsters and other skilled workers.

5. While informative, the obituary of William Boyd seems to greatly underestimate his role (as well as that of three of his four brothers) in the development of Western Montana in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. William’s obituary correctly explained that the Boyd ranch (which was built up both by him and his remarkable wife Minnie) was by the time of his death one of the most substantial independent livestock operations in the state, But his obituary did not explain that from 1895, when he began buying timber land in the Blackfoot River Valley, until after 1910, the year  of the huge forest fires in Western Montana, his main focus was on timber harvesting and lumbering, usually in close cooperation with  the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, from which he leased many thousands of acres of timber and (later) pasture land. During those years, he was a regular visitor to Anaconda, as noted in newspaper reports of hotel registrations.

In August 2014, I found the record of William’s first land buy in the Blackfoot River Valley in June 1895. It was of a 320-acre half section several miles west of the old Boyd ranch-house site, south of Placid Lake.* I found the record in the Deer Lodge County Courthouse, in Anaconda. A few newspaper notices I’ve found suggest William may have been working in the Valley as early as 1890, and that he was definitely living there with his wife Minnie and infant daughter Helen (Nellie) at Sunset (then a logging camp) near the Blackfoot River in November 1893. The present-day one-room school at Sunset marks the location of the logging camp that was once there. The school is  on Sunset Hill Road, a few miles southwest of the original site of the old Boyd ranch house, west of the small community of Ovando.**

*Boyd land purchase: West ½ Section 17, Township 15 North, Range 15 West; Grantee William Boyd, Grantor Michael Kidder; Book 20, Page 376; June 22, 1895; Cost $1,900. Record at Anaconda-Deer Lodge County Clerk and Recorder’s Office, A-DLC Courthouse, 800 Main Street, Anaconda, MT 59711. Satellite images and maps available at Montana Cadastral at http://svc.mt.gov/msl/mtcadastral/.

**Based on a conversation I had in the summer of 1974 with the younger of two sons of William Boyd, William (Bill) Alexander Boyd, in Missoula, the Boyd ranch at its peak consisted of over 10,000 acres of owned land and about 15,000 acres of leased land, leased primarily from the A.C.M. Company. According to Darlene Edge, Lands Program Manager, at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks Headquarters in Helena, the ranch was bought by the state from the Boyd family on 27 November 1948 (personal communication, 14 March 2016). The number of acres bought: 10,836. Price: $160,000.

What seems clear from available information is that from the 1890s into the 1910s, William’s main focus was on timber harvesting. The livestock production appears to have increased in later years, as his three older daughters and two sons grew from their early childhood  to teen (and young adult) years, and were able to help build up the ranching operations, which appear to have become more important, starting in the 1910s. In the earlier years, livestock production was directed almost totally at supplying the logging camps in the Valley. From about 1891 to about 1904, William partnered with his younger brother Charles, to build and operate, near the town of Philipsburg, Montana, a slaughterhouse business, as well as a downtown retail meat market, both of which were run by Charles.

There were, in fact, two slaughterhouses built in succession by the Boyd brothers in the years they were in business in the Philipsburg area, as well as two meat markets in different rented locations on Broadway, which was and still is the ‘Burg’s’ main street. The later slaughterhouse was located south of town on Fred Burr Creek on a 640-acre section* of woods and pasture lands, east of what is now the intersection of Montana State Highway 1 and Rumsey Road. It was Charles who in January 1899 bought the land for construction of the second slaughterhouse. The 640-acre section had previously been worked as a ranch and apparently had a house on it. Charles sometime after buying the property moved his family to the ranch from their home in Philipsburg, which he continued to own until he sold it in 1911, over 6 years after moving to Bend, Oregon.

*Boyd section: Section 1, Township 6 North, Range 14 West; Names on land patent document: Charles Boyd; Date: 8/27/1901; Doc #: 34379; State: MT; Meridian: Montana PM; U.S. Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records (search Montana, Granite County), http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/search/. Satellite images and maps at Montana Cadastral at http://svc.mt.gov/msl/mtcadastral/.

(The second of Charles Boyd’s two sons, also named Charles, was born on the ranch on 5 October 1901. Charles’ older three children —Clarence [born 2 August 1894], Edna [born 6 June 1896], Carol born 25 December 1898]—were born in Philipsburg proper, most likely in the Charles Boyd home on the north side of East Granite Street, just south of what is now the Granite County Courthouse, which faces west on North Sansome Street. The large house that is [about] at that location now is not the original Boyd home. The latter, according to a 1911 newspaper notice, was brick, while the existing house on the site is of wood-frame construction and of a more recent style of architecture [most likely built in the 1920s or 30s]. At the time of the younger Charles’ birth at the Boyd ranch south of town, the entire family was probably living there, as the Boyd house in town had apparently been rented out.)

While William was clearly tied into the Philipsburg slaughterhouse and meat businesses, with 5 years of in-depth looking I have yet to find any evidence that he ever moved any stock from his ranch in the Blackfoot River Valley to the Philipsburg area or even to the stockyard at Drummond (24 miles north of Philipsburg) for sale or loading onto stock cars on the Northern Pacific Railroad’s east-west mainline, which was the reason Drummond was built there in 1883. The travel distance southward from the Boyd ranch in the Blackfoot Valley to Drummond would have been a ‘hard’ 40-45 miles prior to modern paved roads, across a spur of the Garnet Range. And, as I explained before, there is no evidence I have been able to find that William Boyd began significantly expanding his livestock production operations until the 1910s, which is when timber cutting on private land in the Blackfoot River Valley began to slowly slacken.

6. Perhaps one of the more interesting features of William Boyd’s obituary is the remarkably large number of men listed as pallbearer or as honorary pallbearers, the total number being 18. Another point worth noting is the total lack of any social or service clubs or groups listed to which he might have belonged, such as the Montana Grange, the Elks Club, or the organization in which his brother Charles was a member, the Foresters and Woodmen of the World. To my mother’s generation of Boyd cousins (all born between 1891 and 1916), it was a matter of considerable comment (and apparent amazement) that William Boyd was a man who almost never spoke. Considering the unusually large number of men who served as pallbearers (honorary or otherwise) at his funeral, one might reasonably wonder if perhaps he rarely spoke to children or his juniors, but was quite capable of conversing socially with people closer to his own age or those he thought interesting.

In the summer of 1974, my wife Mary Jane, her mother Bess Russell, and I visited for several hours one day with William Boyd’s youngest daughter, Dorothy Haight, and his younger son, Bill, in their home in Missoula. It is perhaps worth noting here that the elder Mr. Boyd was, insofar as I’ve been able to determine, never referred to as ‘Bill Boyd’ in print. He was invariably referred to as ‘William’ or ‘Wm.’ This is an important distinction for his period in history. Bill, the younger of his two sons, characterized his father as a ‘deep thinker’ and ‘bull of the woods’—two terms loaded with significance. ‘Deep thinker’ is a term that I suspect is almost never used by sons to describe their fathers. It requires a deep-thinking father and a keenly observant son. I was quite attracted by this description, because all the available evidence points to its truth. By all accounts (both in print and from memories), he and his younger brothers Charles, David and Alex were exemplars of the better Victorian-era attributes of loyalty, integrity, forthright speech, gumption, hard work and stick-to-itiveness, sound business practices, good citizenship, and good manners toward all, especially women.* Based on many years of study and reflection, I credit their mother Mary Anne Sharpe with their having these qualities.

*In my iconoclastic teen years, I went about the business of trying to find some evidence of bad behavior on the part of these four brothers. Over 50 years later, I have yet to find any. To make up for it, I have found ample evidence for their brother John (Jack) having been involved in more than one scrape, pointing to a life that was often ‘on the edge’ and from which his brothers (up until at least 1902) often ‘rescued’ him.

Each of the Boyd brothers had personality traits that made them, in any era, quite unusual. With William Boyd one such trait was trusted leadership. The term ‘bull of the woods’ refers to a leading foreman or superintendent of a logging operation. William Boyd’s obituary specifically makes reference to his employment as ‘superintendent of the logging operations for A. C. M. company at Seeley lake.’ Logging is a line of work that requires a high level of native intelligence, an ability to make good decisions fast, and great amounts of physical strength and stamina, under conditions where a mistake can result in death or terrible injury. Effectively running a logging operation requires a man who has all these traits, plus, the strength of character to command the respect and implicit trust of the men he is supervising.

It is clear that William Boyd was such a man. With such a history, it should perhaps come as no surprise that at age 81 enough men still knew him well enough to want to serve as pallbearers at his funeral.  A worthwhile project to pursue would be to do the research needed to determine how many of those men named in his obituary worked with or for him in the Blackfoot River Valley.

Another trait William Boyd had, well worth mentioning in closing, is that he—like many Boyd men—found a truly exceptional partner to marry. Based on my inquiries over the years, it was the consensus opinion of most of my mother’s generation of cousins (the sons and daughters of Charles, David and Alex Boyd) that their Aunt Minnie Evalina Atkinson Boyd was the best and the brightest of the women to marry any of the five Boyd brothers. My history-loving mother in describing the various older and deceased members of the family to me in the 1960s told me her mother (Mary Cleophus Dooley Boyd) had said she thought Minnie Boyd was one of the most remarkable human beings she had ever known. Several cousins, including Carol Boyd (daughter of Charles) and my mother, thought she had one of the bests ‘business heads’ in the family, and almost everyone I ever talked with about her commented on her wit, boundless energy and zest for life. Minnie was clearly ‘the right woman to marry.’

I suspect William Boyd knew this from the start.

Some insightful facts about William Boyd determined by calculation:

He was about age

• 23 when he arrived in Butte, Territory of Montana;

• 26 when he was working in the Philipsburg and Granite vicinity;

• 27 when he and his brothers brought their mother to Montana,   where she first resided with her son David in Granite;

• 28 when he bought a house on Weinshein Avenue in Granite;

• 28 when Montana was granted statehood on 8 November 1889;

• 29 when he married Minnie Evalena Atkinson in Deer Lodge on   20 August 1890—Father Remigious DeRyckere presiding;

• 30 when their first child and daughter Helen (Nellie) Florence   was born at Granite on 24 September 1891;

• 31 when Granite County was formed from parts of Deerlodge   County and Missoula County on 1 April 1893;

• 31 when he went into partnership with his brother Charles in   the slaughterhouse and meat business at Philipsburg;

• 32 when he, Minnie and toddler daughter Nellie were living at   Sunset in the Blackfoot River Valley;

• 34 when he made his first major land purchase (320 acres) in   the Blackfoot River Valley, south of Placid Lake.

• 34 when his and Minnie’s second child and daughter Eva Pearl  was born in the Valley on 17 January 1896, probably at  or near Cottonwood Creek.

The main Boyd ranch house was located on Cottonwood Creek to the west of Ovando, and Eva was supposedly born there. But as yet, I have not found the record of purchase of that piece of land by William Boyd, or when the ranch house was built. The land on which the house was built might well have been leased before its purchase. More research is needed to find such information.

In due course, I plan to combine this information on William Boyd with much more, to develop a chronology on the lives of the Boyd brothers and their kin. That will be a major undertaking.

Boyd History (1)                                                Terrence B. Kayes                                                            April 30, 2016