Jessie Jane Munro was born over in Oklahoma Territory, or maybe it was the State, she wasn’t sure ever afterwards. A strip of land along Oklahoma’s northern border had been sold by the Cherokee Nation to the United States Government for a price that of course was a steal on the part of the United States (and they didn’t even pay up until 1964). Jessie’s parents had joined a hundred thousand other folks charging into the territory on September 16, 1893.
The Munro family had come over from Arkansas on the east, and, not interested in staking a big land claim, Jessie’s daddy intended to open a cabinet and wood-finishing business in the little town of Newkirk, already laid out before the land rush began. He had learned the woodworking trade up north, in Wisconsin, and had come south to Arkansas when work turned scarce back home, but he hadn’t been finding things easy. There was also that little matter of his having deserted from the U.S. Army. He had to stay a step ahead of that thing.
Jessie’s mama had just discovered that she was expecting another little one when they had come over to get ready for the big land rush. She had had three children from her first marriage, but her eldest had died and her boy Sammy had run away from home when he was 10, unable to get along with his stepfather any longer. That left Annie, who turned 13 years old a couple weeks after the land rush started. Then there was Johnnie, her first with Jessie’s daddy; Johnnie was 9. The twins had lived only a few months, but then came Agnes, who was 5, May was 4, Claudy was 2, and Lillie turned 1 the week of the land rush.
It was exciting for Jessie’s mama and daddy to start a new venture. Daddy believed they would soon get rich. How could they not? All those settlers surely needed work-working done on their new homes and businesses. It was a perfect setup.
But the land rush was a huge disappointment in many ways for many people. To start with, there were many more settlers than opportunities. Many who tried to stake farm claims found the soil was thin and wouldn’t support what they wanted to do. Many who tried to start businesses based on settlers’ needs found that the settlers were dirt-poor and wouldn’t be in the market for anything remotely suggesting anything other than a dire need for years to come. Such was the finding of Daddy Munro.
Jessie was born in Newkirk six months after they landed there, and before another year passed, the family headed back to Little Rock, with Daddy hoping to get work back there, and if not, to be close to Mama’s sisters so they could help. He got hired by the railroad, finishing the passenger cars, and that paid pretty good for awhile. Their last daughter was born back in Little Rock on Christmas day 1895.
A year later when Jessie’s next-older brother Claudy died, she was still 2 and didn’t understand it very well. Claudy was playing with her and Lillie, and then he was sick and then not there anymore. Where was Claudy? Why couldn’t anyone explain to her?
Death came again the next year when Grandfather Munro died early in the spring. Jessie was almost 4, and she understood what Lillie meant when she said he had gone to heaven. Jessie went outside and looked up into the sky. Heaven was up there somewhere. She wondered if Grandfather were looking down at her and ran back inside just in case he remembered she had stolen his glasses that one time to play with, and they had broken.
Eleven months later Mama died. Everything was horrible after that. Annie moved out and got herself a job working in the Governor’s family as a servant. She didn’t like living with them anymore, even though Jessie and the other little girls loved her and wanted her to stay.
John was gone; he had gone blind from the bad pink eye and Daddy had enrolled him in the Arkansas School for the Blind in downtown Little Rock, and Johnny had to live there. Agnes was always arguing with Daddy, and he was always yelling at her. May did her best to take care of Lillie and Jessie and little Dodie, as they called Medora.
After Mama died, for a time Aunt Frankie took care of the little girls. They loved Aunt Frankie and Uncle George and Cousin Luther. Cousin Luther was Agnes’s age, but he played with them all and they loved him. They had to be careful what they said at home about Aunt Frankie’s house, because Daddy didn’t get along with her and Uncle George.
Jessie couldn’t help getting into trouble. It wasn’t that she wanted to, exactly, it just seemed like every good idea she had turned out to be wrong. It didn’t help that Lillie, just 18 months older, always seemed to do the right things. Lillie was truly good, and Jessie couldn’t understand how Lillie could continue to have faith and believe in prayer and things when nothing had helped Mama, or Grandfather, or Claudy before that.
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| Jessie (bottom right) and her sisters |
When Jessie was 9, Daddy came home one day and announced that he had taken a job in Idaho and they were going there on the railroad. John was back home, cured of his blindness and with most of a high school education from his time at the School for the Blind. He wasn’t happy to leave their home, but he thought maybe he could get work too and help out more. He knew what a struggle their daddy was having. Agnes threw a screaming fit, declaring that she wasn’t going at all. But Daddy ordered her to get ready or get a whipping, and since by that time all the children were intimately acquainted with Daddy’s whip, she shut up.
The train ride was long, hot, and dirty. They arrived in Boise where Daddy bought a wagon and two horses for all their household goods. Jessie, Dodie, and Lillie got to ride in the wagon with Daddy, while May, Agnes, and John walked along beside as they went the ten miles further west to where the office of the Bureau of Reclamation was signing up workers for its Boise Reclamation project, which was building dams on the Boise River. Daddy and John were signed on and started work, just like that.
Jessie and Dodie sometimes were left in Lillie’s care as Agnes and May started in to set up housekeeping for the family. The older girls were only 15 and 14 and did their best, but Agnes resented everything and soon found a boy willing to listen to all her complaints. She was often absent when she was supposed to be home in charge of everything. May took up the slack, but she got pretty impatient with her little sisters who could be a handful, especially Jessie. Lillie could nearly always get Jessie into a better mood by telling stories, and Dodie, 7 years old then, was avid for any and all stories anybody could think up.
May was left to manage the household accounts, because if Agnes had charge of them, she spent every penny on herself regardless of consequences. May was often at her wits’ end to know what to do to buy food for her hungry sisters. Once she hit on the bright idea of disguising pennies as dimes by coating them in mercury and getting Dodie and Jessie to spend them for a few pieces of candy so that they could get the bona fide change. Daddy came home and found out his daughters were engaged in quite literal money laundering. Everybody got a whipping. May figured she’d better be more careful when she got any more bright ideas.
A very difficult year passed. Daddy couldn’t seem to hang onto any job. The next time Christmas rolled around, the only resemblance to the gift-giving season anybody got was Daddy packing the wagon with all their things. They were going to Oregon. He was sure he could get work there. Once more Agnes rebelled. She was going steady with a boy named Bill and she couldn’t and wouldn’t leave him, no matter what Daddy said or threatened. There were terrific fights, and on Christmas Eve, Agnes ran away with Bill.
Daddy, tight-lipped, went about finishing their preparations to leave. He and John tied up the wagon tight and hitched up the horses. They had an additional saddle horse, and John rode it while Daddy drove the wagon. Mostly the girls walked, but sometimes one or another of them got a ride up behind John on the saddle horse, and sometimes they also rode in the wagon.
They had gotten ten miles past Vale when they realized they needed some crucial supplies that they would have to buy back in the town. Daddy had everyone help set up camp, eat their noon dinner, and then he took the saddle horse to go back to town for the supplies, telling John and May to keep the wagon horses carefully hobbled and to watch over everything. He left his big revolver with John.
As soon as he was out of sight, John and May took the hobbles off the horses and had a glorious ride on them. They made Lillie promise to stay in the tent and tell stories to Jessie and Dodie. Jessie was furious. She wanted to go riding too. She didn’t see why she had to stay. She hated hearing the constant refrain, “You’re too little.” She was 10, nearly 11! Why couldn’t she go riding up behind John or May? That one of her sisters would have had to be left behind alone if they doubled up on the horses didn’t seem to register. In the end, John simply said, “No.”
But Lillie was telling good stories, and as usual, Jessie calmed down and entered into the spirit of things under Lillie’s influence. They had a wonderful afternoon. When the big kids came back, they had their supper all together in the tent and and sang until bedtime. Daddy would be back in the morning.
When they rose the next morning, John was aghast not to find the horses anywhere! He woke up May, and they began a furious argument over whether they had or had not hobbled the horses correctly. “Maybe it was thieves,” suggested Jessie. Nobody had heard anything. The worst thing hanging over them all was what they were going to tell Daddy. John and May made the younger girls all promise not to tattle on them about riding the horses.
Daddy got there midmorning, and the first thing he saw was that the horses were gone. He was pretty sure the children had disobeyed him and had ridden the horses around and not hobbled them correctly afterward. He didn’t really believe the story they told of silent thieves in the night. All of the children got a whipping on general principles, but they stayed loyal and nobody tattled. Then John and Daddy spent a fruitless full day looking for the horses and spreading the news of horse thieves back as far as Vale.
The weather had been pretty good, but it turned cold as they left. Daddy and John and May sorted all their goods and left behind everything they deemed unnecessary because of the weight. They hitched the one remaining horse to the wagon and Daddy drove it, but nobody else got to ride because of the weight. It was just as well, because walking kept the girls warm. There were a few places up in the McKenzie Pass as they climbed through the Cascade Mountains where Dodie had to ride because her short little legs couldn’t get through the snow. Daddy got down and led the horse in those places. Jessie wished she hadn’t grown so tall; she would have liked to have had an excuse to ride. Down they went on the western side, landing at Marshfield on the side of Coos Bay.
Daddy and John went out looking for work every day. Most days they were able to be hired somewhere, doing anything available. On days when they didn’t get work, they came back to camp and worked on improving it. Daddy got old scrap lumber and laid a board floor first thing, because the girls first of all wanted out of the mud. Later he put up walls to replace the tent sides and got a piece of tin for the roof. May and John wanted to go to Portland. There would be far better opportunities there, but Daddy put his foot down. Agnes had run away and it made him worry no end about the rest of the girls. He didn’t want them in any big city with all its temptations, especially while that World’s Fair (the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905) was going on.
As soon as the Fair closed, Daddy was more than ready to agree to go to Portland. Agnes and Bill came and joined them there. Daddy took Bill and John with him looking for work. Often they would ride the rails, legally or under the cars, looking for work, sometimes not returning home for a few weeks at a time. Agnes bore two babies that died; then her third, a girl named Mary Agnes, came in August 1907 and lived. Thirteen-year-old Jessie was thrilled with the baby and happy as could be to take care of her, at least at first.
Eighteen-year-old May, in the midst of preparations for her marriage to Paul Rieboldt, was too busy and frankly tired of being saddled with yet more unwanted responsibility. She and Paul married in the fall of 1907 and she took on her own set of responsibilities, which were more to her liking.
Lillie had finished the 8th grade and got a job cleaning houses. She didn’t have time to take care of a baby full time, but after she finished work each day she took her turn.
Dodie was still in school, but Jessie was thinking she would quit. She would take care of the baby, she thought. The reality set in quickly that it wasn’t very easy. If Agnes were home, she bossed Jessie around, and Jessie resented it. But Agnes was increasingly not at home; she was looking for work. Her marriage to Bill was coming apart, and she knew she was going to divorce him as soon as she could find a job. Jessie was interested in boys, even more than Agnes had been at her age. She ditched school as much as she could, at first claiming she was needed at home, but increasingly Dodie and Lillie realized they had to take care of little Mary somehow between the two of them, because they did not know where Jessie was all day. They prevailed on May to come to the rescue, so she had Jessie come live with her some of the time.
In 1910 Agnes was divorced and living in a boarding house while working as a waitress. That fall Lillie got married to a very nice, very handsome young man with a lot of wavy black hair and beautiful blue eyes. May and Paul had a cute baby daughter. Dodie was going to high school and keeping house for their father. Jessie spent her time partly with May and Paul, helping with their baby, and partly at home, and partly running around with the boyfriend of the moment.
Then Jessie found a permanent boyfriend, Frank Allen. He thought Jessie was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She really was beautiful, taking after her father’s side of the family with a long oval face, a classic nose, level brows over tilted almond-shaped eyes, and a full-lipped mouth. She didn’t look like any of her sisters who resembled their mother with round faces, large round eyes, and flat noses.
As soon as she turned eighteen, Jessie and Frank took the ferry across the river to Vancouver, Washington, and were married and away on their honeymoon, which consisted of a weekend in a small hotel and a quick move to a cheaper boardinghouse. Jessie loved being married. She loved escaping from the drudgery of the work she had had to do for her family. It was different doing chores with and for Frank, somehow. They always had fun together.
Their first son was born almost exactly a year later. They named him Cecil. Nineteen months later they had little Frank. Just a day short of exactly two years later, they had their first daughter, Thelma. Their second daughter, Hazel, was born 22 months after Thelma. Their third son, Gerald, came eighteen months after that, and their third daughter, Beatrice, followed in another 22 months.
Having six children in less than nine years was a lot of work for Jessie. They had lived in Vancouver where Frank worked at various manual labor jobs, then they had moved up the river a little ways to Camas where he found work in a paper mill. After the Great War (WWI) they had moved back across the Columbia River to Portland where Frank found work sometimes on the docks, sometimes in the mills, and sometimes with various building contractors. The money was tight and Frank wasn’t a steady provider. Jessie grew restless.
Jessie made friends with a man named Timmons, and it led to a divorce from Frank around 1923. She married the Timmons man, but the relationship was fleeting. They were divorced shortly, and Frank tried again. Jessie agreed to remarry him in 1926, and they went to a preacher in the little town of Stevenson, up the Columbia River Gorge from Vancouver about 45 miles, across from the Cascade Locks. Their witnesses were Frank’s younger brother, Roy, and Jessie’s sister Dodie’s sister-in-law Gertrude Copeland.
Jessie’s sisters Dodie and Lillie couldn’t understand her inconstancy. They both had married steady men and stayed married to them for a very long time. Agnes understood better. She had admittedly made a mistake in running off with Bill when she was only sixteen, and she had had a few rather wild years looking for happiness; but then she had married a man she truly loved and they had had eight happy years together before he was killed in a tragic train accident. She had married a third time a few years later. May too, had had three marriages because she had been widowed twice. Paul, her first husband, had died of a fever, and so had her second husband, a merchant seaman in far-off Japan. John, their brother, was rather out of the picture by this time. He had married a truly snooty woman from Scotland who fancied herself a society woman, well above and better than her sisters-in-law. They tried to keep in touch, but Margaret wanted little to do with her husband’s family.
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| Lester Munro (center) and his daughters and their children, 1917 Left seated: Agnes; left back:May; center back: Lillie; right back: Jessie, holding her daughter Thelma and son Frank standing in front of her (son Cecil is on Grandpa's lap, left); right seated: Dodie. |
Jessie’s youngest child, Beatrice, was four when her parents remarried. The marriage didn’t last; within two years Jessie was marrying a Hungarian immigrant named Alexander Kiss. Alex was divorced from his first wife and was working as a laborer in Vancouver while Jessie had been living in Portland. They were married in Vancouver by a Christian minister, with Jessie’s sister Lillie as one of their witnesses. Lillie was hoping her sister would settle down, but it didn’t work out that way. Jessie and Alex were soon divorced, and Jessie’s choices of men became increasingly worrisome.
The Munro sisters were intensely loyal to one another as grown women. During the 1920s and early 30s they met often at their father’s farm near McMinnville and had huge annual picnics there that lasted three or four days. Their children constantly visited their cousins back and forth. Nobody ever was sure how many of the cousins were going to gather at any particular sister’s house for Sunday dinner. It was a fun time, when they could all be together often.
Daddy’s bones ached in the winter, and May convinced him to move south with her and her husband. They settled in San Diego, and Lillie and her husband bought the farm and continued the picnic traditions.
Jessie met a man named George Downing whose children were of a similar age to hers. They were married in Yamhill County, most likely at the McMinnville farm, or else at the home of a nearby preacher. Jessie and George’s life together was as rocky as any of her previous marriages, but somehow she was past the age when she wanted to look elsewhere, and so was George. They fought and stuck together for over ten years.
It didn’t help that George was decidedly a dicey character. Born George Edgar Putnam in Kansas in 1888, he and his parents had moved slowly westward, and he was working as a lumberjack in Washington when he had to register for the draft in 1917. He married a girl named Edith Grace Welch two years later, and they had a number of children. They lived in Canada for a year, then they moved to southern California, and within another year they moved back to Washington. After their last child was born in 1928, George sort of disappeared and resurfaced six years later with a new name, George Arthur Downing, divorced, with the same children as George Putnam. Very curious. One corroborating piece of evidence is his daughter Edith’s marriage record. It clearly states that she is the daughter of Edith Grace Welch, and the record shows that she was born the same day and place as the daughter of George Putnam. But her marriage record states that her father’s name is George Downing, even though her name is Edith Lorraine Putnam. Why George changed his name is a mystery.
Jessie’s children had begun to marry and to give her grandchildren. In 1940 when Jessie and her youngest two children, Gerald and Beatrice, were living with her and George Downing and several of his children, Jessie had four grandchildren: Barbara Jean, age 2, Cecil’s only child; Susan, age 3, Frank Jr.’s daughter; Richard F King, age 4, and Jessie Marie Dakin, age 1, Thelma’s two children.
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| Jessie, flanked by her little girls in about 1947 |
The parents of the one little girl kept her with them. George Downing came down and took the other little girl back to Washington. She stayed in Thelma's home for awhile. Then she was delivered to Jessie's sister in Oregon, the one Jessie had asked to take care of the girl if the need should arise.
Jessie Jane Munro Page Timmons Page Kess Downing was just 57 years old when she died.
She had one more granddaughter born after she was gone.
