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came to visit him at Portland’s “anti-Klan" St. Vincent’s Hospital,
rather than the fashionably lower cut shirtwaist she usually
preferred. She reluctantly revealed the brand to him, stating
she had not wanted to worry him.
In the story of the Standish branding that appeared on
page one of the January 14, 1923 Sunday Portland Journal,
Nevada spoke at length about the assault. She described how
two hooded men in Ku Klux Klan robes entered through her door
around midnight. She said there were many more klansmen
outside, though she could not say how many. She told reporters
that while one man held her down on the bed with his hand over
her mouth, the other heated an iron in the woodstove. One of
the men asked the other whether they should brand her on the
face, and he answered, “No, let’s put it on her breast, then she
won’t wear any more low-neck dresses." She said she fainted
from the pain. She remembered that before the brand seared
her flesh, one of them said, “You’ve been wanting a cross, now
we’re doing to give you a d------d fiery one!”
The Portland Telegram, which also covered the story
in great detail, illuminated the meaning behind this ominous
statement made by Nevada Standish's attacker. According to
the Telegram, her husband revealed in an interview from his
hospital bed (he had been seriously ill for 16 months) that
Nevada, who had moved off their ranch into town to support
herself by working for the editor of the more middle of the road
Herald newspaper when Mr. Standish became ill, was:
....lonely in Tillamook, and because so many of the
women were members of the Ladies of the Invisible Empire,
(she) wanted to join the organization for the sake of the social
life it might giver her while I was away.
The ‘Ladies of the Invisible Empire' was the women’s
arm of the Ku Klux Klan. Evidently she was turned down
because, as her husband, “barely able to sit up in bed”,
continued:
Unless you have a relative who is a member of the Ku
Klux Klan you cannot become a member of the Ladies of the
Invisible Empire, and I am not a klansman. But the man who
branded my wife knew of the fact that she had applied for
membership in the women's organization and that's what his
remark about wanting a cross meant. If he was not a klansman,
he could not have known that my wife had ever made application
for membership in the Ladies of the Invisible Empire.
Mr. Standish also referred to what he called the Klan’s
“further effort to damage Mrs. Standish (with) the dragging up in
connection with this affair of the moonshine case in October.” A
still had been found on the Standish ranch outside of Tillamook,
but they were acquitted on appeal of the charge of having any
thing to do with the still. Standish maintained:
“The moonshine charge couldn't have been any motive
for klansmen branding her, for dozens of the klansmen around
Tillamook are moonshining and bootlegging themselves and
couldn’t get into a moral frenzy over it even if they had believed
she was connected with any moonshine affair, which they knew
she was not.
Standish lay the blame for the branding at the feet of
the Klan, who he believed were reacting to jealous small town
gossip “of the sort that comes up around a woman who is left
alone and defenseless." Mrs. Standish was described as one of
the “best looking women in Tillamook" both by her husband and
in several other articles.
On the lead paragraph on the front page of the Portland
Telegram, Mr.Standish threw down the gauntlet to the Klan when
he proclaimed:
If Ku Klux Klansmen were not guilty of breaking into my
home and branding my wife, then let the Klan bring in the men
who did do it and I may be convinced.
Mrs. Standish and her attorney Webster Holmes
evidently pushed to have the alleged crime brought before the
grand jury. The jury met to hear the case on February 5, 1923.
According to a front page article in the Headlight, Mrs. Standish
was examined by a doctor who testified at the hearing that the
brand was a self-inflicted iodine bum. (Iodine in its full strength
is extremely caustic and can cause severe and painful bums.)
It bears noting that the doctor who examined her was a Grand
Exalted Cyclops of the Order. The District Attorney presiding at
the grand jury hearing, Mr. T. H. Goyne, was also a klansman
with a high ranking.
The grand jury handed down a “no true bill." The
Headlight reported that “this virtually means that the grand jury
believes that the branding did not take place." The authorities
ultimately claimed, on the basis of the doctor's pronouncement
that Mrs. Standish had simulated a Klan brand in an attempt to
discredit the Klu Klux Klan and turn public sentiment against
them.
A few days later, after a private meeting with the Grand
Dragon of the Realm of Oregon, Frank Gifford, Nevada Stan
dish publicly and completely refuted that the branding had been
done by the Ku Klux Klan. What went on behind those closed
doors is forever lost to history.
A clue to the branding mystery surfaced 45 years later
when Colonel R. Eberhard, former state legislator and Masonic
Lodge Master from La Grande, was killed by a car while crossing
a street on an icy night in 1968. When his safe was unlocked by
attorneys seeking to settle his estate, it was found to contain
over 200 pages of the secret minutes of the La Grande Ku Klux
Klan from 1922-1924, a very rare and valuable historical find.
These minutes were recently edited and published by David
Horowitz, a professor of history at Portland State University *
On January 26, 1923, the minutes report a visit to the
La Grande Klan by the Grand Dragon of the Realm, Gifford.
After the opening ceremony attended by 72 klansmen, Gifford
spoke to the group on several subjects, including the branding in
Tillamook, which by this time was circulating around the country,
threatening to further discredit the Klan.
“Relative to the case in Tillamook, Oregon, Mr. Gifford
had this lady come to his office and give an explanation of these
alleged accusations,” the minutes read, and quote Gifford:
“On her left breast you could see a large red spot and by
drawing the skin tight you could trace a very dim cross, probably
put on by a very light acid and is rapidly disappearing. This
woman held the position of a bootlegger and had trouble with the
authorities to the extent that they desired to get rid other and
this is the means they used Klansmen, the chief of police and
his assistant put on the cross and though the papers refused to
publish this, our Klan paper, the 'Western American' will event
ually do so. We want the whole world to know that they can't put
this over on the Klan. ’
""The Klansman as Outsider: Ethnocultural Solidarity & Anti
elitism in the Oregon Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s" by David A
Horowitz, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, January 1989. Also by
Horowitz, ‘Making Sense of the Oregon Klan in the 1920s”,
North Coast Times Eagle, June/July 1995
A brief check of the Tillamook County Klan Klavern 8
membership list for 1923-1924, on file at the special collections
library at the University of Oregon in Eugene reveals that the
police chief of Tillamook at that time, Henry White, was a dues
paying member of the Tillamook Klan.
The Klan paper, the Western American, never published
a word about the branding of Nevada Standish as the La Grande
minutes promised. Presumably the grand jury hearing took place
soon after Gifford's visit to La Grande and, with a “no true bill"
handed down, there was no need to refute the story. There is no
appeal possible for grand jury decisions. Seven men voted that
the crime never occurred. (Tillamook did not allow women on
the jury even though a law had been passed in Oregon the year
befere requiring women to join the jury pool.) Whatever really
happened, Nevada Standish ran out of options after the grand
jury decision. She disappears from Tillamook history at this
point, but the attorney who helped bring her case to the grand
jury for a heying, Webster Holmes, died a few months later.
How he died is not known. According to the Tillamook County
Court records on file in the state archives building in Salem,
Holmes consistently defended numerous people the Klan
would have targeted, including immigrants, foreigners, IWW
organizers and the few Native Americans left in the county.
The same grand jury hearing of February 5, 1923
also handed down a "true biir indictment against O. Hendricks,
an IWW organizer charged with criminal syndicalism for passing
SONS & DAUGHTERS
OF CHIEF KILCHIS LIE
IN UNMARKED GRAVES
After a short trip to the present owners of the Odd
Fellows Cemetery in Bay City, I learned that they are taking
very good care of the old cemetery records that date back
150 years. These records reveal that the unmarked graves
of Rosy Bob Kilchis, daughter of Chief Kilchis, and Columbus
Kilchis, Robert Kilchis and Jack Kilchis, sons of Chief Kilchis,
are located beneath the cypress tree in a site picked out and
paid for by Charlie Kilchis, also known as Chief Kilchis,
sometime in the 1850s. (The whereabouts of the grave of
Chief Kilchis was a well kept secret among his people and
may never be known.)
If you would like to pay tribute to these first citizens,
resting in their unmarked and unhonored gravesites, go to the
large cypress tree and find the grave of Nellie Kilchis Schunter.
She is the great granddaughter of Chief Kilchis She died in
childbirth and you can find her mother, Sadie Oster, buried down
towards the road. Nellie’s grandmother was Rosy Bob, daughter
of Kilchis, and she is buried in an unmarked grave between
Nellie and Grant Marshall, a grandson of Chief Kilchis and son
of Rosy Bob. Grant’s brother Ed Marshall is nearby. Ed Marshall
served in World War 1 and was arrested and jailed for 6 months
for possession of a pint of whiskey in 1922. His case and that of
Nevada Standish were both heard at the same grand jury hear
ing in February of 1923.
If you wander a little ways down the hill you will come
upon the grave of Ellen Center, granddaughter of Kilchis and
niece of Rosy Bob Her mother, Maria Kilchis, was Chief Kilchis'
youngest daughter, and Rosy's sister Beside Ellen Center lies
her son Frank Mitchell, killed in World War 1.
Visit these graves (I like to go when I am having a hard
day) and bring flowers, gifts, tears, or prayers for the peace of
these people who were treated so terribly. It is a sobering and
humbling experience.
-HELEN HILL
out union literature in the area lumber mills. Also indicted that
day was Edward Kilchis Marshall, grandson of Chief Kilchis, for
alcohol possession. As a result of this indictment Marshall was
later sentenced to six months in jail and a $500 fine (astronom
ical in those days) for carrying a pint of whiskey. When the O.
Hendricks case was brought to trial it attracted statewide atten
tion and became a high profile test case for the rights of Wobbly
organizers across the state.
According to frequent articles in the Headlight, the Klan
continued its steady gain in popularity and influence over the
next few months. The paper proudly reported the consolidation
of the Wheeler and Tillamook chapters, creating one of the
biggest organizations in the county Members of the “famous”
Klan claimed to have “something less than a thousand” in
membership throughout Tillamook County, a whopping 25%
of resident adults. However, the Klan probably inflated estimates
of their numbers to appear stronger and more popular than they
were. In reality, Klan membership was probably very much less
than a thousand.
On May 30, 1924, one of the largest Klan rallies in the
state was held in Tillamook The Headlight proudly reported the
grand event as quite orderly and peaceful.
Following this large rally complete with a fiery cross that
failed to light (and crash landing of a plane that carried the unlit
cross), regular accounts of the Klan disappear from Tillamook
Newspapers. In Tillamook County as well as elsewhere in the
state, the Klan’s influence was being rapidly undermined by
reporters from larger cities and the dawning realization on the
part of communities of what the Klan really stood for. Nationwide
a growing wave of Klansmen were being convicted of more and
more lurid crimes involving bootlegging, prostitution, murder and
profiteering, the very crimes they professed to be safeguarding
in places like Tillamook County Perhaps more importantly, the
citizens of Tillamook County had realized that far from offering
constructive solutions to their lives, the presence of the Klan
created negative disruptions, tensions, and a needlessly hostile
environment.
Helen Hill is an artist, writer and playwright whose
current play about the branding of Nevada Standish, Time Out
Of Mind, which opened at the Bay City Arts Center on February
14, will be performed in Cannon Beach at the Coaster Theater
March 14 and at the Astoria Performing Arts Center March 15.
This article has been exerpted from A Brief History of Fear &
Intolerance in Tillamook County
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
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MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
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