# Family Feuds and Timber **From Kansas to the Washington Woods** Daubel The Daubel story in America opens on the Kansas prairie, where Ludwig Daubel and his wife, Magdalene Streib, first put down roots after crossing the Atlantic in 1881. What follows is the account of how that transplanted Württemberg family moved from a German farming settlement on the northern plains to the timbered country north of Spokane, and of the households — colorful, hardworking, and occasionally notorious — that grew up there. ## A German Foothold on the Prairie The family's first American home was Hanover, in Washington County, Kansas, near the Nebraska line, where a German settlement had already taken root around Hanover and Washington in the district known as Charleston. For roughly a decade, from about 1885 to 1895, this rolling tallgrass country along the Little Blue River was home to **Ludwig**, **Magdalene**, and their children — Philipp, **Karl (Charles)**, August, Sophie Elisabeth, Johann Ludwig (Louie), and Heinrich (Henry). Here a blacksmith and mason found steady demand: horses to shoe, plows and wagons to mend, ironwork and stonework for a growing farming community. And here, among German-speaking neighbors who worshipped in the same traditions and married their children among the same families, the Daubel children came of age. Kansas, however, was a way station rather than a destination. The 1880s and early 1890s were a time of restless movement across the American interior, and the decade closed under strain — falling crop prices, farm debt, and drought. For a household of grown and nearly grown sons, the pull of cheap railroad land and heavy timber in the Pacific Northwest proved decisive. ## The Sons Go West The move from Kansas came in stages, led by the sons. Henry and Phillip went first to Oregon. Phillip continued on to the west coast, settling in Thurston County around McLane and Olympia, while Henry, August, Louie, and Charles came to the Elk and Chattaroy country of Spokane County. In 1898 the young men bought land from the railroad for $2.50 an acre and, clearing heavy timber stump by stump, built three separate farms. In 1900 their parents followed, shipping their household goods and all their farm machinery west by train and homesteading on land adjoining their son Charles. This was a country still shading from wilderness into settlement. Cougars ranged close enough to the schoolhouses that children were sometimes kept indoors, the nearest doctor was far away, and neighbor women served as midwives. The forest that had to be cleared was itself the region's great resource: sawmills and logging camps such as the Spokane Lumber Company at Milan and Edwards and Bradford at Elk offered wage work, while the same families kept farms and raised stock. Milan, a short horse-drive away, served as the everyday trading point; anything beyond it meant a train ride into Spokane. It was a small, tightly knit, German-rooted community, its country schools — the Muhle School, the Deer Creek School — scattered miles apart, and its households bound together by the sharing of ice, labor, and threshing rounds. ## Ludwig and Magdalene's Last Years Ludwig and Magdalene lived out their days in this country north of Spokane, their Elk-area home no longer standing. Magdalene — born in Bönfeld on 10 July 1840, daughter of **Georg Streib**, whom Ludwig had married on 31 January 1867 — died on 11 July 1923, one day after her eighty-third birthday. Grandchildren remembered that a horse-drawn hearse came to the home at Chattaroy to carry her to the funeral home. Ludwig outlived her by a year and a half, dying on 28 December 1924 at Milan at the age of eighty-five. Both are buried in the Milan Cemetery. ## The Daubel Brothers and Sister Of their six children, most settled within reach of one another. Henry, the eldest, born in Bönfeld on 18 December 1867, was among the first west; he married Emily Romaine on 26 September 1903 and lived out his life at Elk, where he died on 12 November 1945. Phillip, born in the spring of 1869, went west first but alone, making his home in Thurston County and dying at Olympia on 18 October 1930. Louie — Johann Ludwig, born 27 May 1871 — farmed near Elk, married Sophie Peters on 9 March 1907, and outlived all his siblings, dying in Spokane on 15 September 1961 at the age of ninety. The twins August and Sophie Elisabeth were born together on 29 September 1875. August settled and farmed near Elk and died in Spokane on 22 September 1959; Sophie married Earnest Frederick Wagner on 12 January 1903, made her home at Milan, and died in Spokane on 16 November 1940. ## The Family in the News Life among the bachelor farmers of the Elk district was not always quiet, and for a stretch of years the Daubel name appeared in the Spokane papers with striking regularity. The brothers — Charles, Henry, August, Ludwig, and Phillip — made news in their several ways, from petty quarrels to a full-blown murder inquiry, and one former game warden, pressed to describe the neighborhood, allowed that "the town of Elk has real feuds like Kentucky" — with the single mercy that, unlike Kentucky, no one ever seemed to get killed. The most conspicuous of them was Henry, whose troubles began, fittingly, with a wedding that would not take. He and his bride were first married on 11 June 1903 by one R. H. Craig, an expounder of the Church of God who had lately taken up a homestead near Camden — only for the neighbors to observe afterward that Craig was no ordained minister and the union therefore no union at all. Duly worried, Craig looked into the matter, confirmed the bad news, and advised the couple to try again. And so that September the married-not-married pair came to Spokane behind a farm wagon loaded with live ducks — one hundred and two of them, brought along by the bride's thrifty brother, who saw no reason a second wedding trip shouldn't double as a day at market. The ducks were left standing in the street while Henry and his bride were properly married at last by Judge Stocker, at the cost of another five dollars, whereupon the whole party climbed back aboard the duck cart and rattled home. The marriage they had worked so hard to secure did not survive the winter. Henry was German; his wife, Amelia — recorded variously as Emelia, Matilda, Plusson, and Blusson — was French; and neither could speak the other's tongue, nor make themselves understood in English, so that their short life together "was made up mostly of signs." What passed between the signs was not happiness. Married in October, Henry was in the divorce court by January, alleging that his wife abused him, damaged the furniture, cooked badly enough to drive him to the restaurants, threatened to kill him, and had brought into his house four unruly children by a former marriage who had, the complaint sniffed, inherited "their mother's aversion to soap and water." She, for her part, said he had deserted her while she was carrying their child, leaving her alone through her confinement without food or care, and had disowned the baby outright — "the child was not his own and he did not care for it." By February she was hauling him back to court for unpaid alimony. The story darkened through 1904. In June the county commissioners, hearing that the mother was spending her days "drinking and carousing" while her children ran wild and filthy, sent the sheriff up to Elk to gather the four little ones and place them in a charitable home. That same month Henry was convicted of beating his wife before Justice McNamar of Milan, who felt the powers of a justice of the peace far too slender to punish the crime as it deserved — the most he could impose was thirty days and a hundred-dollar fine — and bound the case over to superior court. By July Henry was in a cell of his own, jailed for knifing a man named Thomas Lowe in a quarrel over the disputed property, having first been laid about the head and shoulders with a shovel. He came to the jail almost gratefully: his life, he said, had been threatened many times, and he produced a whitecap letter to prove it — five days' notice to pay a thousand dollars "or we will burn all the property you have," signed only "BY COM." Behind the prison walls, the paper noted, Daubel sighed with relief. The divorce itself, when it came, was pure vaudeville. Amelia gave her testimony through an interpreter while three babies howled in chorus across Judge Richardson's courtroom — her own infant, and two more belonging to a neighbor called as a witness — until the wind rattling the windows and the wailing of the children together nearly broke up the proceedings, and the judge was reduced to a broad, helpless smile as the lawyers strained to catch a word. The mother rolled and hoisted her hungry baby in the air until the spectators grew dizzy, and business was suspended until quiet returned. When it did, the divorce was granted to Amelia on her cross-complaint, with custody of her four-month-old, three hundred dollars, and a decree forbidding her ever to visit Henry's home again. The related assault charge was quietly dismissed the following year, the family troubles by then "settled and disposed of." If Henry hoped that ended his career in the newspapers, he was disappointed, for he had by now acquired the enemy who would follow him through the rest of it: his neighbor Peter Clancy. In 1907 the two men each pleaded guilty to assaulting the other in some altercation near Milan. By 1909 the feud had swollen into a tangle of accusations — that Henry had thrown a rock through the Clancy window and struck Mrs. Clancy in the abdomen, robbed the Clancy boy of a dollar and pitched him into a creek, and fired a six-shooter at Clancy himself — all of which Henry denied, insisting it was Clancy who had cracked him over the head with a rifle. A boulder "about the size of a man's skull" sat on the courtroom table as Exhibit No. 1 in the resulting twenty-thousand-dollar damage suit; the jury, out three hours, decided Henry had not thrown it. The quarrel reached its strange and sinister climax in 1922, when what began as another humdrum complaint — Clancy charging that Henry had loosed his cattle onto the Clancy crops — turned, in Justice Stocker's court, into something closer to a murder inquest. Witness after witness for the Daubels rose to link Clancy to a string of deaths and disappearances that had haunted the Elk district for years. One testified that Clancy, seen shortly after the lumberjack John Olsen was found dead near the Sunset highway, had remarked, "No, I haven't been down this way since I had to kill Olsen. I've been lying low since that." Others recalled a man named Katz, last seen leaving in Clancy's company to look at a cabin, whose torn coat and vest Clancy had later produced from a ravine with the guess that bears or wolves had got him — and whose paper Clancy had afterward tried to cash; and Ben Miller the fruit-tree peddler, said to have "gone to Alaska"; and Joe Rooky the barn boss, who went to Spokane and never came back; and "Dad" Turpening, found with his skull crushed on the railroad tracks near Milan. Signs reading "Clancy killed Olsen" had been nailed to trees along the road to Elk. Clancy, interviewed at his ranch, laughed the whole thing off as the invention of a fifteen-year feud with the Daubel brothers — those "bachelor farmers, lumberjacks and stockraisers" whose land he so disliked that he had built a road over the hills expressly to avoid passing it. The prosecutor took careful notes, promised an investigation, and the puzzled justice took the matter of the cows and the murders alike under advisement. The other brothers supplied their own headlines. Ludwig — "Louie" — endured a divorce in 1920 that the papers followed like a serial. His wife, Kate, a woman of sixty-four to his forty-eight and by her own admission on her fifth marriage, charged that he had kicked her against a fence and knocked her senseless, breaking her nose and her dental bridge, and that he blasphemed the Bible and mocked her for reading it. Ludwig answered that Kate spied on him from behind stumps, locked him out of his own kitchen, refused to cook, and had married him only because he was "the better fixed" of her suitors — and, more alarmingly, that she had bored a loophole in the wall of the farmhouse to take better aim when she shot at him, and kept a supply of strychnine that he suspected "was for me and not for the gophers." Kate allowed that she had indeed fired at her husband, but insisted the cartridges were blanks. Judge Oswald awarded the divorce to Ludwig, let Kate keep the Newport property she had brought to the marriage, and left him his ten-thousand-dollar farm. August, for his part, went to court in 1918 over a deer. Game wardens, alarmed that forty-five deer had been slain around Elk in a single year, caught August and one J. C. Dore tending a fresh carcass on — of all places — Peter Clancy's ranch, and hauled them before Justice Stocker. The two men swore the coyotes had done it; the justice decided otherwise and fined them fifty dollars apiece, a verdict they carried up to the superior court without success. It was at this trial, with Clancy testifying for the state and complaining that he was the victim of "pro-German animosity," that a former game warden offered his celebrated distinction: the feuds at Elk were as real as any in Kentucky, only nobody ever got killed. Charles kept to more ordinary misfortune, losing his threshing machine — along with Joe Vosahlo's barn and twelve tons of hay — to a smut explosion near Camden in 1921. And then there was Phillip, the brother who seems to have wandered in from a gentler story altogether. In June 1919 the country correspondent reported that "Philip Daubel drives a pair of prancing steeds and says he does not covet an auto." By September the bug had bitten: "Mr. Phillip Daubel was bitten by the auto bug. He now drives a car instead of his prancing steeds." His chief trouble was the road, or the want of one — he and two neighboring families were forever waiting for theirs to be opened, and when the work was abandoned for the winter Phillip reckoned the only way in or out was to lay greased stringers on the grade and let the settlers haul one another up by rope and windlass, and slide back down. After the knives and whitecap letters and boulders and blank cartridges of his kinsmen, Phillip and his prancing steeds make for a welcome and comic coda. ## Charles and Mary For all this turbulence, it is the household of **Charles** that forms the family's steadiest thread. Born **Karl** in Bönfeld on 14 January 1873, Charles was about eight when the family emigrated. He grew into a hardworking and famously stern man — the kind who, when one of his own sons fainted in the heat of harvest, would simply drag him into the shade until he came around and then carry on with the work. Charles met his future wife, **Marie "Mary" Anna Rudolph**, when she came out West to visit her aunt and uncle, Emil and Amelia Scholz, at Elk. Charles and Marie married in Spokane on 16 August 1902. They had eleven children — **Herman Carl**, Martha Elizabeth, Sophie Marie, Freda Mary, Elizabeth Pauline "Elsie," Marie Emma, Carl August, John, Ernest Ludwig, Albert Emil, and Rose "Rosie" Eleanor — all born at home on the farm in Chattaroy. With no doctor near, their neighbor Mrs. Freeman Staley, together with Nora Scholz, served as midwife for every one of the births. On the Chattaroy farm the family lived with remarkable self-sufficiency. Charles combined blacksmithing with farming; they raised apples, grapes, and other fruits along with grain that they ground into their own flour and cornmeal, and they kept their own meat, poultry, milk, and vegetables. Charles ran a threshing machine around the neighborhood to thresh his neighbors' grain, and the family operated a small sawmill to cut the lumber for the buildings on the Daubel farms. In winter they went to the Elk mill pond to saw blocks of ice, packing them in sawdust in an icehouse to keep food cool and make ice cream — ice they shared freely with neighbors, as their neighbor had shared her skill at the bedside. The First World War placed the family in an uneasy position. Having left Germany precisely to escape the military, Charles now found his German birth a liability. In 1918 a Chattaroy neighbor, W. R. Dwyer, reported him to the U.S. Marshal at Spokane, noting that Charles had been born in Germany, was not naturalized, and was not registered as an alien enemy, and branding him, in blunt wartime language, "a Hun pure and simple." The report entered the federal files, but it left no visible break in the pattern of his settled life. Marie died in Spokane on 9 January 1939, at the age of sixty, and Charles on 31 August 1950, at seventy-seven; both were buried at Milan, the corner of Washington that had been home since Marie's visit first brought her west. ## The Eleven Children The children of Charles and Marie came into the world across nearly two decades, most of them at Milan, and their lives carried them across Washington, into Idaho, and as far as Alberta, though the family's center of gravity remained the country around Chattaroy. **Herman Carl**, the eldest, was born at Milan on 18 May 1903. He would later marry **Thressa Lillian Strong**, but that is a story for another chapter. Martha Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, was born at Milan on 24 November 1904, married Edward Clayton Miller on 24 October 1924, and moved north to Alberta, living around Olds, Westward Ho, and Red Deer until her death at Olds on 2 May 1994. Sophie Marie, born at Milan on Christmas Eve 1905, married Stephen William McCurry on 15 November 1939 and settled in Mount Vernon, on the Washington coast, where she died on 10 August 1993. Freda Mary, born 2 August 1907, married John Arnst on 16 October 1925 and lived in the wheat country of Ritzville, dying there on 22 May 1990. Elizabeth Pauline "Elsie," born 22 June 1910, married Patrick J. Reddie on 23 June 1935 and lived widely — Odessa, Ritzville, Chattaroy, and even Lincoln, Iowa — before dying in Spokane on 21 September 1993. Marie Emma, born 10 January 1912, married Roy Douglas Newman on 14 January 1932 and lived longest at Deer Park, where she died on 30 April 2005 at ninety-three. Carl August, born 1 May 1913, married Juanita Hazel McGowan on 27 January 1942, divided his life between Chattaroy and Spokane, and died in Spokane on 4 June 1976. John, born 24 November 1914, married Ada Ellen McKernan on 26 September 1946, stayed close to the home ground at Chattaroy, and died on 20 May 2001. Ernest Ludwig, born in Spokane on 18 May 1917, married Ina May McGowan on his own birthday, 18 May 1946, lived many years at Chattaroy before settling at Deer Park, and died there on 30 January 2004. Albert Emil, born in 1920, married Viola Alice Bronkhorst on the last day of 1948, made his home at Chattaroy, and died in Spokane on 29 March 2014 — the last of his generation. Rose "Rosie" Eleanor, the youngest, born 24 March 1922, married Alois "Louie" Karg on 22 December 1942, lived between Chattaroy and Spokane, and died in Spokane on 5 January 2012. It is chiefly through Rosie that Marie's own words survive, a daughter recording the fragments her mother had spoken of a childhood ended by a mother's death, a father's departure, and a one-way passage across the sea. ## Letters from the War Of all the eleven children, it is Ernest whose voice carries this chapter to its close. During the Second World War he served as a sergeant with the 318th Fighter Squadron of the 325th Fighter Group — the "Checkertail Clan" — which fought across North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Italy, escorting bombers and striking rail lines, bridges, and fuel supplies. From those distant airfields Ernest wrote home to his sister-in-law Thressa, Herman's wife, at Chattaroy. Two of his letters survive. **From North Africa, on 21 November 1943:** ``` Dear Sis and All, Well here I am again and still doing O.K. How is your family and suppose Herman is still working, tell him that I will trade him jobs anytime he feels like it. I have got all of this life that I really want. I had a letter from John yesterday and he sure is lucky to be able to stay in the states. This Christmas will make the third Christmas I spent away from home. Did Herman and Albert get their buck this year, I suppose I would get the buck-fever if I tried deer hunting again. I have some pictures and as soon as I get more prints made I will send you one. I have an a** on me now like some old women. We have a setup in our tent now so we can develop our own pictures. I must close so I hope you and the rest a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Your Bro, Love Ernest. ``` **And from Italy, on 17 January 1944:** ``` Dear Sis and All, Well here I am in Italy and still nothing to write about or they won't let us write about anything around here. How is everybody at home. We been having nice weather here lately. There are lots of women here in Italy, but our orders are to stay away from them but that is hard to do. There are women and kids around every day selling oranges and nuts, boy I never ate so many nuts in all my life as I have over here, they are just crazy for cigarettes over here. I got a Christmas card from the Golden Chain Club of Chattaroy. Boy I sure would like to see your family again, I bet they sure changed since I seen them, but as long as they are as good as their Uncle Ernest it will be alright. Well Thressa I must close so hope this finds everybody is O.K. As Ever, Love Ernest. ``` From the discharge papers issued at Bönfeld in 1881 to a soldier's longing for a Chattaroy Christmas sixty years later, the Daubels had carried a single line from a Württemberg village to the Kansas prairie and on to the timbered farms north of Spokane, where Ludwig and Magdalene, Charles and Mary, and most of their children remain buried at Milan, within a few miles of the land the brothers cleared for two dollars and fifty cents an acre.