Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Also waiting at the station was a teamster named Thomas J. Shaugnessey, who had been delegated by County Commissioner Hoyt to transport the two young victims. Shaugnessey seems to have had an odd, but decidedly firm, sense of protocol. Once the two bodies had been placed side by side in the back of his wagon, he insisted, over the objections of the crowd, that before he could go to the hospital, both victims had to be inspected by his boss, the county commissioner.

  While Shaugnessey’s wagon proceeded down the street at a slow walk, impeded by the crush of curiosity seekers, several members of the crowd rushed ahead and pulled Commissioner Hoyt from behind the counter of his dry goods store. By the time the wagon pulled up, Hoyt was already out on the wooden sidewalk in front of his store, explaining impatiently that he had not asked for the two men to be brought to him. Once presented with the bodies, however, some combination of professional duty and curiosity caused him to clamber up onto the back of the wagon, pull back the bloody blanket from the face of the dead man, and then squint at the seeping wound in the temple of his weakly breathing companion.

  Hoyt looked at the victims long enough to see that they were hardly more than teenagers and that, from their clothes, they probably came from respectable families. The dead man was dressed particularly well, in a brand-new, ankle-length, tan overcoat. With a heavy sigh, Hoyt turned around, clapped Shaugnessey on the back of his head, and said, “I didn’t mean for you to bring them here. This boy belongs in the hospital and the other in the morgue. Get along now, and do what you should have done in the first place.” With that, he hopped off the wagon and went back to his customers, leaving Shaugnessey to engage in yet another dispute with the crowd—this time over what order the bodies should be delivered to their destinations. Since the shortest route to the hospital passed right by the morgue, it seemed only a matter of common sense to Shaugnessey that he should stop there first. This time the crowd was adamant, and the bullheaded teamster finally surrendered to its will, but only after a ten-minute shouting match during which his wagon did not budge from in front of Hoyt’s store.1

  The living man, who, on the basis of papers found in his pocket, was determined to be Ross Fishbaugh of Saint Joseph, Missouri, died at 7:00 P.M. without ever regaining consciousness. By 9:00 P.M. he had joined his companion, Waldo Emerson, also of Saint Joe, on twin enameled tables at the Mercantile Undertakers. Lamps burned late that night at the Mercantile as the bodies were readied for the morning train to Saint Joseph, and also at the offices of the Cheyenne Daily Leader, where the story of the killing was being prepared for the general public. Shortly after dawn, as the ice-packed bodies were being loaded into a boxcar, newsboys hurried out into the streets carrying papers that, under the headline “A Bullet in Each Brain,” declared the double murder to be “the most dastardly crime ever committed in the west.”

  Over the next couple of weeks the Daily Leader ran regular articles about Emerson and Fishbaugh and the progress of the investigation into their deaths. Much was made of the apparent affluence of the two young men. The newspaper remarked on the softness of their hands and the fineness of their clothing, which was such as “a young man roughing it might choose from a fair wardrobe.” Fishbaugh, twenty years old, was said to have been the only child of, and sole means of support for, his widowed mother. Emerson, eighteen, was the son of a relatively well-educated factory foreman who, having little faith in the local authorities, had hired a private detective to investigate the case. The young men had been on their way to Denver in search of employment. Emerson’s father had assumed that they would be traveling first-class, but apparently they had chosen to save money and have a bit of adventure by riding the boxcars. Emerson’s father had also been under the impression that his son was a teetotaler, but he and Fishbaugh had been seen in at least one bar and had a bottle of whiskey on them when they died.

  Both the police and the detective hired by the Emersons assumed that the motive for the double murder had been robbery. The boys were said to have left Saint Joseph with a silver watch and $140 between them and were rumored to have won $100 at a crap game in Grand Island, Nebraska. But the police had found only twenty-five cents and two diamond shirt studs (worth ten dollars) on the bodies. Suspicion centered on William Frantzell, a thief who had been let out of jail in Saint Joseph the day the boys departed and who had been seen leaving the train in Hillsdale.

  One of the investigators, however, had a different theory: John Martin, the Laramie County sheriff, was intrigued by a story told by John Brooks, the water pump engineer at Hillsdale.

  At the very moment when Manafield had discovered the two bodies on the stopped train, Brooks and his family had been sitting down to their midday meal. Answering a knock at their back door, Brooks found a slight sixteen- or seventeen-year-old tramp standing on the step, clutching his canvas sack of belongings against his chest. The boy wanted to know whether Brooks could spare some food. He seemed a little anxious but didn’t look like a troublemaker, so Brooks invited him in and had his daughter put another chair at the table.

  Brooks had not yet heard about the bodies on the train, which was still waiting on the tracks within sight of his house, but as the meal progressed he became increasingly suspicious of the odd, young tramp he had let into his home. The boy told Brooks that he came from New York, but when he talked about where he was going, he said Cheyenne one time, Kansas another, and Omaha a third. When Brooks asked the boy why he did not just get back on the waiting freight train, he answered that he wanted to “get a good feed” first—but for most of the meal he just pushed his food around his plate with a fork and hardly ate a mouthful. Brooks also noticed that, every now and then, the boy would steal a glance at a silver watch that he kept under the table. The boy paid for his meal with a quarter, which he said was all the money he had, but later at the station Brooks saw him purchase a ticket on the next passenger train to Cheyenne with a silver dollar. When Sheriff Martin spoke to the Hillsdale stationmaster, he learned that the boy had first asked about a ticket to Manhattan, Kansas, and then abruptly changed his mind. On the hunch that this confused lad might eventually make it to Kansas, Sheriff Martin telegraphed the boy’s description to his colleagues in Manhattan.

  On October 15,1890, two and a half weeks after the murder, sixteen-year-old Fred Miller walked into the office of the Republic, a weekly newspaper in Manhattan, Kansas, and asked to speak to the paper’s editor, Albert Stewart. Fred was accompanied by his brother, Charley, a wiry, hollow-chested boy who was only five feet four inches tall, with a bulging forehead, ghostly gray eyes, and a long, thin beak of a nose. Although Charley looked several years older than his brother, he was in fact more than a year his junior, having just turned fifteen.

  Albert Stewart knew Fred as the adopted child of his colleague J. L. Loofboro, the editor of a weekly paper in nearby Leonardsville. Fred had come by train from New York with a party of orphans some four years earlier. He was a good worker, a quiet, considerate boy, and Loofboro had been so happy with him that, the winter before last, he had agreed to take in Fred’s youngest brother, Willy, who was now fourteen years old. Stewart did not know the third brother, Charley, but recognized the family resemblance even before being introduced. He also saw that both boys looked pale and uneasy, so he invited them into his private office, where he offered them chairs in front of his desk. Once the door was closed, Fred told Stewart that his brother had something important to say.

  “It’s been weighing on my mind,” Charley began.

  “Yes,” said Stewart with an encouraging nod.

  For a long time Charley seemed unable to talk. But then, drawing a deep breath and speaking in a voice that betrayed no other emotion than a slight relief, he confessed that he was the one who had killed the two young men on the train in Wyoming.

  Stewart was not much of a journalist. His paper mainly ran wedding and death notices, puff pieces about local merchants and politicians, slightly reworded transcriptions of national stories from the Kansas C
ity papers, and the occasional oddity about a two-headed pig or a sleepwalker’s near-brush with death. But he was enough of a professional to realize that he had just been handed the biggest story of his career. He picked up a pen and a notebook, pulled his chair around beside Charley’s, and, for the next two hours, grilled the boy, not only on the double murder but on his whole life.

  Charley was to tell this story dozens of times, to other journalists, to the police, and finally in court. Everyone who heard it remarked on the odd alacrity with which he described both the killing and his own suffering, loneliness, and frustration. The disjunction between his grim tale and the easy, almost charming voice in which it was told led to his frequent description in the press and, more significantly, in legal documents as “morally irresponsible”—as, in effect, a “sociopath,” although the term was not in use at the time. Given the apparent oddness of Charley’s emotional responses, it is surprising, at least to the modern sensibility, that no attempt was made to look into them. He was virtually never asked about his motives or about how any of his experiences had made him feel. The result was that, with all of its detail, Charley’s story was strangely hollow, dream-like, and open to wildly varying interpretations.

  Charley was the third of four children born to a German immigrant couple living in New York City. His father owned a bar, much of the profits of which he drank up himself. When Charley was four, his mother died of consumption. A year later his father, who had long talked about suicide, finally killed himself by drinking Paris green, an insecticide. The bar and about $1,000 passed into the possession of a man the Miller children had always called “uncle,” with the understanding that it was being held in trust for them. All four children were sent to the New York Orphan Asylum, which, founded in 1806, had been the city’s first large institution for the care of orphans. Originally, the asylum had occupied a broad swath of rolling meadowland running above what is now Seventy-third Street, from Broadway down to the Hudson River. But by the time Charley and his siblings stayed there, the asylum’s brownstone house had been cut off from the river by Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside Park and the cream-colored granite pinnacles of the financier Charles Schwab’s seventy-five-room mansion. To the east the asylum was dwarfed by the twelve-story turreted mass of the Ansonia Hotel.

  The Miller children remained at the asylum until their twelfth birthdays, when they were placed in foster homes by the Children’s Aid Society. Carrie, the oldest child and only girl, went to live with a family in Rochester, New York. Fred went to Mr. Loofboro, and so, ultimately, did the youngest of the Miller children, Willy.

  Charley left New York, in a company of eighteen children, on March 27, 1888. Some days later he and the other children were led into a meetinghouse in Saint Charles, Minnesota, to be examined by a crowd of farmers, mechanics, and merchants. Charley was chosen by a farmer, W. R. Booth, who was looking not so much for a foster child as for cheap labor.

  Booth’s farm was in Chatfield, some twelve miles from Saint Charles. As the sun rose on Charley’s first full day with his new family, Booth led him to a barn and taught him how to hitch a horse to a plow. The old farmer was annoyed when Charley told him that, having spent all of his twelve years in a city, he had never seen a plow before, or ridden a horse, or even held a pair of reins. Saying, “Well, it’s time you learned,” he told Charley to get behind the plow, and then he led the horse and the boy out to a field. Booth walked Charley through the first few furrows, but then left him alone until it was time for lunch. After the meal, it was back out into the field, where Charley plowed entirely on his own until the sun was down. The next day this routine was repeated, and again the day after, and so on until all the plowing had been finished. Then Charley was set to other tasks, which he also worked from sun to sun. Booth gave Charley food and a place to sleep but never made him feel welcomed into the family and never provided him with adequate clothing, even after the two suits the CAS had given him had been reduced to rags by hard labor.

  In May 1888, Charles Fry, the CAS western agent who had conducted Brace’s 1874 investigation, visited Charley at Booth’s farm and sent the following report back to New York: “a good boy and has an excellent home—goes to school and is doing well.”2 One can only assume that Charley, like John Jackson at Mitchell’s farm and Marguerite Thomson with the Larsons, had been forbidden to breathe a word of his true condition during Fry’s visit, and that Fry had been so eager to see the placement as a success that he did not pick up on whatever evidence there was to the contrary. But Charley had no hesitation about confessing in regular letters to his brothers and sister that he was being worked too hard and that Booth frequently whipped and beat him. These letters were the main reason that, when it came time for Willy to leave the orphanage, Fred Miller begged Loofboro to take the little boy in.

  When Charley was asked in court why he had been beaten, he said that it had mostly been for “a certain disease” that he could not control, a disease for which he had also been regularly beaten at the orphan asylum. Only when it became obvious to him that the district attorney and probably everyone else in the courtroom assumed this “disease” was masturbation did Charley confess that it was bed-wetting, and that he had only stopped for the first time in his life since his incarceration. At another point in the trial Charley did confess that he masturbated as often as four times a day, and that he had been circumcised while at the orphan asylum. A physician, verifying that Charley had indeed been circumcised, said that the operation was often done to discourage both bed-wetting and masturbation.

  Under the terms of the CAS agreement, Booth was required to give Charley a “common education.” At that time public school in rural Minnesota ran from the beginning of December through the end of March, but for reasons that were never made clear, Booth did not send Charley to school until February 1889.

  The teacher at the Chatfield one-room schoolhouse seems to have recognized that Charley was in trouble from the moment he walked into her class. During the two months that he was her student, she wrote letters to the New York Orphan Asylum and the Children’s Aid Society describing his situation with the Booths and asking that he either be placed with a different family or sent a ticket so that he could join his brothers in Kansas. She was so concerned for him, in fact, that when school let out at the end of March she took him home to the small farm just outside of town where she lived with her parents.

  The Booths had no idea where Charley had gone but probably thought that, with the planting season coming up, he had run away to get out of work. Then one morning after he had been gone about a week, the Booths’ eldest daughter drove past the teacher’s farm and caught sight of Charley in the yard. That afternoon, in a scene strikingly reminiscent of John Jackson’s capture by Mr. Mitchell, Booth and one of his grown sons burst into the teacher’s home and dragged Charley away, telling him that they ought to tie him to a tree and give him a cowhiding.

  Charley never found out whether they would have made good on this threat because, when they got back to the farm, Mrs. Booth handed her husband a letter that had just arrived from the CAS. The letter, prompted by the teacher’s accounts of Charley’s condition, simply reminded Booth of the terms under which he had agreed to take the boy and told him, among other things, that Charley had a perfect right to leave whenever he wanted.

  This was the last straw for Booth. He put Charley back into the wagon and drove him, not to the teacher’s farm, but twelve miles in the opposite direction, to Saint Charles. Pulling up in front of the meetinghouse where he had first picked the boy out of the crowd of orphan train riders, Booth told him to get out of the wagon, and then drove away without giving him a word of explanation or a penny of money.

  Charley’s courtroom description of his abandonment by Booth contains one of the very few indications of the state of his emotions to be found anywhere in any of his autobiographical accounts. Significantly, however, his feelings are not described explicitly but are only the implication of an inc
idental detail. The district attorney asked Charley what he did after Booth drove away, and Charley answered: “I started out into the country looking for work. The sun was just going down. I got about two miles from town, or one mile, and a farmer met me and he asked what I was crying about, and he gave me a job.”

  That was all. Charley was always very specific about time, distances, and other such facts. He corrected two miles to one mile. But when it came to describing what any of his experiences meant to him, or how they made him feel, he never got more explicit than “a farmer . . . asked me what I was crying about.” And nobody ever asked him to elaborate.

  Charley stayed with this farmer for a couple of months and, for the most part, seems to have been treated well enough, although the farmer did have a habit of periodically getting drunk and driving his whole family out of the house. Throughout his stay Charley kept in contact with his old teacher. One afternoon in late May she drove out to the farm waving a letter from the CAS. Inside was a five-dollar bill and his long-awaited ticket to Leonardsville, Kansas.

  Despite months of anticipation, Charley’s reunion with his brothers lasted only a few weeks. In a letter to the Cheyenne Daily Leader, Loofboro explained that although he had come to regard Fred and Willy as “members of the family,” he simply did not have room or work for yet another Miller boy. Loofboro did find Charley a job, however, with a Mr. Colt, who was the editor of a weekly newspaper in Randolph, Kansas, about twenty miles northeast of Leonardsville.

  In effect, Charley was an apprentice at Colt’s paper. He got no salary other than room and board but was taught typesetting. His main complaint was that his new employer, like Booth, refused to buy him new clothing. Charley had no choice but to continue to wear the same two ragged and outgrown suits that he had been given by the CAS.