We’re visiting good friends and former neighbors in Colorado Springs for a few days, and took a day trip up to the historic mining towns of Victor and Cripple Creek.
There’s a family connection here. My mother’s uncle, James McPherson–who was married to my grandmother’s sister–was a miner in Cripple Creek and served as a union organizer for the Western Federation of Miners during the labor wars around the turn of the 20th century.
Uncle Mac, as we called him, was still alive when Meda and I got married and returned to Hawaii for graduate school. He was around 90, living along in his Kaimuki home. And I took these photos when we celebrated a birthday, it was something around his 91st year or close to it.
Of course, pinning that down was difficult because he lied about his age to get into the Army, and the different birthdates carried through his long life.
That was just one layer of the mystery surrounding his life that we’re trying to pierce. He is not listed in the roster of miners, but there are a couple of factors that could explain it. First, during the labor wars, there were several fires in which official records were destroyed.
And then, according to my sister, Bonnie:
We don’t know his real given name or when he stopped using his real surname. Any James or John Clingan in any Crippke Credk registries? He was born in June – either 1878 or 1882. He was a known union organizer in Cripple Creek and known to have been close to the Stratton brothers, mine owners. Also a skilled gambler at the card tables.
He ran away from his Pennsylvania home as a young teenager, made his way across the counry, rode the rails with other “blanketstiffs”, as he called them, worked as a laborer in the mines in several western states, signed up for stint in the Army during the Spanish-American War, later in Hawaii worked for Mr. Dillingham’s railroad, among other jobs.
I know Bonnie has more files which might help put more of the pieces together. After visiting Cripple Creek, we may be more motivated.
We did get a surprise in Cripple Creek. At least for folks from Hawaii, this was a surprise. Snow. In May.
After drafting this entry, I found this short piece that Bonnie posted on Ancestry.com. It just gets weirder and weirder.
Although most of the available records give his birthdate as June 1882 and his name as James F. McPherson, Mac confided to his son and a niece that he was actually four years older. His wife, he said, was the only person he ever told what happened during those missing four years of his life. He gave the younger birth date when he enlisted in the US Army in 1907, and used it relatively consistently in official records after that. The 1930 census and the age given on his youngest son’s birth certificate are the exceptions. There are also some photographs taken “at Uncle Mac’s 90th birthday”. If he was really born in 1882, his death in 1971 would have been before his 90th birthday.
Further, Mac told his oldest son, his birth name was not McPherson. He was born a Clingan, son of Thomas H. Clingan and Mary Elizabeth Almost. While he did not give her his birth surname, he did name his siblings for his niece: Amidee, Oscar, Adrian, Bessie (who married a Jollife and worked in the glass factories of West Virginia), and Bertha.
Mac adopted the name McPherson while in Colorado. There was still considerable prejudice in the mining camps, the story says, so Mac dropped his Clingan name and took on a good Scottish name instead.
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Please feel free to NOT include this in the comment section…I just wanted to share…
I spent the first 7 years of my life at 1736 Whitehall Road in Colorado Springs. Dad worked at NORAD and we had the prettiest lawn at the time. The girl across the street would grow up to be a D.O.
Looking at our house via Google Street View, I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness as it now appears that our tidy little house has become the biggest eyesore on Whitehall.
http://www.xoxoui.com/house-proud-psyche/
Nice to see Cripple Creek again. A favorite hiking area for the 15 years I lived in Colo. Spr. Hope you went up Pikes Peak. I helped with the Marathon a few years at Bart Camp,hiking the 7 miles from the Peak one year. I have never been so sore. My great grandparents had a summer home at Manitou Springs. They would travel from Woodward, Ok., camping at Holly, Colo. in a big grove.
It wasn’t unusual to experience snow in early June, but we knew it wouldn’t last.
Ian, I am surprised an old Wobbly like you would assume a labor organizer would change their name to avoid “prejudice” rather than for more practical reasons.
As you know, Cripple Creek was a very important site of radical labor organizing and brutal repression from the mine owners. I had assumed the main action had occurred earlier, at a time your uncle would have been too young to be in the middle of it. But I found this online. Your uncle would have been a young man of 20 (or 24) at the time:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5654/
“In 1902, corporate mining interests in Colorado decided to crush the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). By the following year, civil war erupted in Cripple Creek, Colorado, as state and local officials and local businessmen joined with the large corporations against the miners. Before it was over, thirty men had been killed in numerous gun battles.”
In addition to his union activities in one of the most dangerous places for someone to be engaged in such activities, you say he was a gambler.
I suspect the story he changed his name to avoid ethnic prejudice glosses over a lot of things.
BTW, I have been digging into my ancestors from a slightly earlier period. There had been a story of a great, great grandfather who had allegedly been a drummer boy for the Confederacy who had deserted, moved out to San Francisco and then married into the O’Brien family, taking the wife’s last name to conceal his tracks. He was allegedly French, not Irish.
Digging through the old census records, I found my great grandfather, John H. O’Brien, as born in 1849, allegedly in New York. In one census, his father is reported as born in New York as well. In another, as born in Ireland. In a third, as born in France. WTH?
Yes, John O’Brien was a common name. But the census reports all the members of the household and it was definitely the same John H. O’Brien whose father was being reported as having occurred in 3 different countries. One can imagine the story changing over the years or a different family member slipping when answering the census taker’s questions. I have five different census polls showing three different answers. “What a tangled web…yada, yada….”
First off, that was my sister’s discussion of the name change. Second, we’re not at all sure when it happened. All that is part of the mystery. Interesting things you turnrd up in your own family research!