Whiskey Men and Multiple Marriages

Foreword:  In profiling some 660 pre-Prohibition “whiskey men” I have been impressed with the stability that most achieved in their married lives.  Divorce was uncommon.  Moreover, a second marriage usually meant a first spouse had died.  Sometimes, it appears, re-marriage was a way for a man to have a mother for his young children.  My research, however, has revealed three cases of whiskey men in multiple marriages, each of them unique in the conjugal details.

Whoever coined the phrase, “lucky at cards, unlucky at love,” might have had in mind Samuel J. “Sam” Thompson of West Brownsville, Pennsylvania.   Sam won a distillery in a game of chance one night and became famous for making a premier whiskey.  As he was rising  in wealth and prestige, however,  three of his four wives died within five years of his marrying them, one of them leaving him with three small boys.

At the age of 23, Sam married for the first time in 1843.  The bride was named Martha Cooper.  After five years of marriage but no children, she died in 1848, leaving a grieving husband behind.  The same year,  Lady Luck was with Thompson in a poker game, winning the deed to a distillery along the Monongahela River.   Although the distillery was the only way of collecting the debt, Sam knew nothing about making whiskey and competition was stiff.  An old friend gave him advice:  “Make better whiskey than the others.”   He did and during the next several decades, the name Sam Thompson Rye became synonymous with quality.

In 1857 Sam moved to a large house on the other side of the Monongahela River in the town of Bridgeport.  Two years later at the age of 39 he married a second time.  She was Esther Wilson of Washington County.  Over the next five years.  Esther bore him three sons.  Then in 1864, this second wife died, leaving Sam with three small children, one of them a baby.   A single father, he raised his boys without a female partner for the next six years.   Then in 1872, at age 52, he married Elizabeth Crawford.  But the Thompson “five year curse” struck again.  Elizabeth died in 1877.

Meanwhile Thompson was demonstrating ability as a businessman with interests in banking, natural gas and coal mining.  He also married again.  This time in 1882, he wed Bridget Dawson, a local widow.  Sam was 62.  Bridget outlived the Thompson 5-year curse by three years and was still living with him at his death.  Sam died in December 1899 at the age of 79 and was buried in a family plot in the Beallsville Cemetery, Washington County, Pennsylvania.  It appears that all four of his wives are buried adjacent to him.

In writing about her Montana ancestor, a descendant headlined an article “Franklin James Pierce — A Complicated Man.”  That was an accurate assessment of a saloon keeper and liquor dealer whose labyrinthine ways and tangled fortunes were reflected in his marriages.  An Ancestry.com family history has copies of three Pierce marriage certificates issued within a single decade.  In 1890 when he was 24, working as a waiter in Butte, Frank met an Irish immigrant girl named Julia O’Neil by whom he fathered a son.  He subsequently wedded her.  After a relatively short marriage, they divorced and she returned to Ireland with the boy.  

Eventually Pierce moved to Missoula, Montana, where he owned and managed the Gem Theatre, a vaudeville house. There he met and fell in love with Lulu Inman, originally from Kansas City, a dancer who was performing at the Gem.  They were married on New Years Day 1898.  Lulu rapidly became restless “off the circuit” in Missoula, Montana.  When her chance came to join the Rentz-Santley Novelty & Burlesque Company on the road, Lulu left town and abandoned Pierce.  The local newspaper headlined:  “She Refused to Live with Him; Missoula Man Looking for Divorce from His Spouse on the Ground of Desertion.”  

Before long, however,  Frank found true love in the person of Mary Helena Murphy, born into a New Orleans immigrant Irish family.  She also was a performer at the Gem.  In June 1900 the couple were married by an Episcopal priest at Holy Spirit Church in Missoula.  Pierce subsequently opened a saloon and liquor store in Butte, Montana, featuring a whiskey he called “Green Arbor.”  He bought a large house in Butte.  He needed it.  This marriage was destined to last and produce ten children.  A photo from Missoula taken about 1910 shows Frank and Mary (standing) with five of their brood.  They named the two oldest girls “Missoula” and “Montana.”  While some of his children were still youngsters, Pierce died in 1926 of heart disease at the age of 59.  

During a highly energetic lifetime James R. “Jim” Hogg managed to juggle the responsibilities for making and selling a nationally recognized brand of whiskey, managing an array of successful local businesses, serving as Mayor of Popular Bluff, Missouri, and winning four terms as County Sheriff.  With enough activities to keep most men exhausted, Hogg also found time for multiple marriages over his 74 years.  

Hogg, shown here, was married five times, divorced four times, and married to one woman twice.   She was his first wife, Ida Dillard, the daughter of Louis Dillard, a pioneer farmer who was one of the founders of Hilliard, Missouri, and a man of some wealth.   When Hogg married Ida about 1880, her father gave him a 160 acre farm in exchange for a wagon and a team of horses.  That marriage produced one son in 1881.  By 1884, however,  Hogg had divorced Ida and was married to Susan S. Klutts who bore him twins in February 1885, one of whom died in infancy.

Fast forward to about 1887.  Hogg had divorced Susan and remarried Ida.  In December of 1888, she bore him a daughter.  Then, possibly as a complication of childbirth, Ida Dillard Hogg died.  Her husband’s grief appears to have been short-lived.  Barely a year later he married Clara Catherine Smith of Poplar Bluff, possibly to have a mother for his children.  Jim and Clara would have three sons of their own in what appears to have been the longest of Hogg’s marriages.  The 1900 census found a family of five Hogg children, one of Ida's, one of Sarah’s and three of Clara’s, all living with the couple.

Sometime during the next decade, Jim and Clara divorced. The 1920 census found him, now age 57, married a fifth time to Ruth Naoma Haas (or Hawas), a woman 23 years his junior who was working as a clerk in a dry goods store when they met.  Perhaps because of the age difference this union also was not fated to last. In the 1930 census Hogg was living with his brother and gave his marital status as “divorced.”  When he died by drowning at age 74, the tributes were many, including this one:  “No resident of Butler County was ever closer to his  fellow men than the beloved Jim Hogg during his lifetime.”   The writer might have added  “And closer to Butler County women.”

Note:  More complete biographies of these whiskey men can be found elsewhere on this blog:  Sam Thompson, September 4, 2012;  Franklin James Pierce, May 22, 2017;  Jim Hogg, November 29, 2013.

Whiskey Men as Lawmen

Foreword:  It did not happen very often but upon occasion a saloonkeeper or liquor dealer would also pursue a career as a lawman.  Those instances generally were confined to the Old West where social and community ties were less rigid and a whiskey man could be seen as an effective keeper of the peace and nemesis to lawbreakers.   Here below are the stories of three such men.

 For decades the men of the Schwethelm (pronounced “Sweet-helm”) family were virtually synonymous with the Texas Rangers. A background as lawman subsequently gave Ernest Schwethelm important credentials for running saloons in the wild and violent Texas Hill Country.  Even a fellow Texas Ranger might find his demise, however, in one of Schwethelm’s drinking establishments. 

Ernest’s father, Henry Schwethelm, shown here, was born in Dusseldorf, Germany but at an early age with his family emigrated to Texas.  At 17 Henry joined Captain L. H. Nelson’s Texas Ranger Company stationed in San Antonio.  He moved on to serve with Capt. John W. Sansom’s company, headquartered in Kerrville, Texas.  Later two of Henry’s sons would be recorded as Texas Rangers, including Ernest shown above at a San Antonio reunion of the Capt. J. H. Callahan Rangers.   During the late 1800s Ernest with a partner came to own and operate saloons in Kerrville.   Among his drinking establishments was The Ranch Saloon, shown below still standing.   

The Ranch Saloon had a reputation for being a rowdy place and reputedly was the site of the murder of a Texas Ranger.  He was Tom Carson,  a tough, bad-tempered, and somewhat mysterious character.  About 1880, he was recorded as part of a small Ranger scouting party in the Fort Davis area looking for the perpetrators of a series of robberies.   Near del Norte they came across a gang of thieves carrying their loot toward Mexico.  In the firefight that ensued, a shot cut Carson’s hat brim and another passed under his leg, cutting his stirrup and wounding his horse.  Unfazed, he wounded one of the robbers and aided the killing and capturing of the band. Carson reportedly was shot and killed in the Ranch Saloon in April 1893.  Details about the event and Carson’s assailant are sketchy.  

Dodge City, Kansas, above, was known as the roughest, toughest, most lawless town in the West.  It was, that is, until Chalk Beeson, shown here, came to Dodge as a saloonkeeper and stayed to help bring law and order.  Leaving his native Ohio,  by the mid-1870s Beeson had moved near the town, purchased a ranch, and rapidly became wealthy in the cattle business. With a partner in 1878 Chalk bought what would become one of America’s most famous Western saloons, The Long Branch. 

The Long Branch is where Chalk became acquainted with noted lawmen and gunslingers of the time, men like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Bill Hickok, and Bat Masterson. Throughout this period Beeson’s reputation as an outstanding citizen — and perhaps a steady gun — had been rising.  He was asked to run for sheriff of Ford County, was elected and served two terms from 1892 to 1896.  Among his accomplishments while serving as sheriff was killing a member of the notorious Doolin gang after it had robbed the Spearville Ford County Bank in broad daylight and escaped into Oklahoma Territory.  Without waiting for a posse and almost singlehandedly Chalk tracked one of the bandits to his hideout and in the ensuing melee shot him fatally.  For that act, Beeson collected the rewards offered by the state, banks, the railroads, and the insurance company for apprehending, dead or alive, a member of the Doolin Gang. 

The newspapers of his time were high in their praise of Sheriff Beeson  They described him as “a quiet, almost noiseless man” who believed in stopping trouble before it began and yet someone who “always got his man.” “He came to Dodge City when every man carried a gun and the fittest survived,  Beeson survived.  But he is not fierce.”   After his stint as sheriff his fellow citizens elected Chalk to two terms in the Kansas State Legislature where he developed a reputation for avoiding bombastic speeches and working quietly among his colleagues to get things done.  

During a highly energetic lifetime James R. “Jim” Hogg managed to juggle the responsibilities for making and selling a popular brand of whiskey while serving four terms as County Sheriff.  He ran numerous enterprises, with his distillery as the largest money-maker as he expanded beyond a local market for his whiskey to regional and even national recognition.

His enterprises were not sufficient to absorb Hogg’s high octane energies. Reportedly at the insistence of his friends, he ran for the office of sheriff of Butler County on the Republican ticket in 1892 and was elected.  During that first term he became highly popular for his kindly acts.  One of them later was reported in a Popular Bluff publication called the Ozark Beacon.  The story told of a $200 license fee charged to every circus that came to Poplar Bluff, a cost that one circus manager was unable to meet.  The publication reported:  “Although Mr. Hogg was not particularly fond of the early day circus people who came to the city, he had a soft spot in his heart for the many children who would be unable to witness their first circus unless the necessary license fee was paid. Mr. Hogg never discussed the incident but friends confided in later years, the beloved sheriff paid the $200 circus fee to the city and the children were not disappointed.”

Unable to succeed himself as sheriff by Missouri law,  Hogg ran to become the third elected mayor of Poplar Bluff and won a two year term.  But his true love apparently was being sheriff of Butler County.   In 1902 he was again elected to that office and served through 1906. Once again he was prohibited  from succeeding himself and he retired to private life at the expiration of that term but ran for the office again in 1920. He was elected and served through 1924.  

Hailed for his thoughtfulness and diligence in solving crimes,  Hogg also had difficult moments as sheriff.  In 1903 he accompanied two convicted murderers to the gallows, the first public hangings in twelve years in Butler County.  The first hanging went badly.  Although the condemned man’s neck was broken by the fall, according to press accounts, he was able to speak for a while and his body twitched and contorted for almost fifteen minutes before he died.  Jim Hogg’s reaction to this scene has not been recorded.

Note:  Elsewere on this blog are longer biographies of each of these whiskey men who also served as lawmen.  The reference is:  Ernest Schwethelm, November 15, 2013;  Chalk Beeson, August 17, 2014; and Jim Hogg, November 29, 2013.