Twice a Widow – Mrs. Henry Langlois
Langlois Drowned At Riverside
Mill Employe Falls into the Water, Is Stunned by Log and Fails to Come Up
Henry Langlois of Riverside, an experienced riverman, was drowned in the mill pond near the Clark mill at Riverside yesterday afternoon, between 3 and 4 o’clock. His body has not yet been recovered. He was rolling logs off a landing and, in trying to get a hook out of a log, slipped into the water. Another log rolled from the landing and struck him on the head. It is presumed that the man was stunned, as he was known to be a strong swimmer. At any rate, his body never rose. All afternoon and until 9 o’clock last night grappling for the body was kept up, but without any success. It will be resumed this morning.
Henry Langlois was about 35 years of age. He came to Riverside from Restigouche, New Brunswick. He had been married to this wife less than a year. He was her second husband and she is now twice a widow. She has three children by her first marriage.
Langlois had but another day’s work to do at the place where he met his death. He expected to have it finished by tonight.
The article above appeared in The Missoulian on June 20, 1912.
This sad article is striking to me in a couple of respects.
I believe my Grandfather, Charles, also worked in the Bonner area at about the same time that Langlois was killed. A millwright, my Grandfather was later killed in 1916 at Mullan, Idaho, in an accident at the large Morning Mine mill site. My Grandmother had evidently met him while teaching school in St. Regis in 1910. She had attended the University of Montana after coming to the Missoula area from Bozeman as a youngster in 1899. My father was born in Missoula the year of Langlois’s accident, in 1912, and one of his sisters, Agnes, was born at Bonner in 1914.
Upon his death, my Grandfather, also born in Canada, left a widow with 4 youngsters and the tragedy was surely unimaginable, I would think. Very little was ever said about it in my family. My Grandmother moved back to Missoula and within a couple of years, found happiness and a second husband, C. E. ‘Roy’ Dickerman. She had 4 more children with him and died of cancer in Missoula in 1934.