COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL March 23, 2016
Offbeat Oregon History
The Circuit Preacher Chronicles:
A longshoreman’s funeral
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
For the Sentinel
O
ne fi ne day, in around
1886, the Rt. Rev. Lem-
uel Wells was approached by a
deputation from the local Long-
shoremen’s Union. The burly
dockworkers had a sad story to
tell and a request for the Rever-
end’s spiritual help. It seemed
one of their members, while
stumbling home following an
epic spree, had fallen in the
water and drowned. His body
having been retrieved, the long-
shoremen now wanted Wells to
give their poor deceased pal a
decent Christian burial service.
Wells had been quite possibly
the fi rst working Episcopalian
pastor to set foot in the Oregon
country, just after the Civil War.
Based out of Walla Walla in the
Washington territory, he’d been
responsible for the spiritual well
being of Episcopalian residents
from Gold Beach to Tacoma and
as far east as the Idaho-Montana
border.
But in 1885, the church had
reassigned him to Tacoma. He’d
gone from a lawless frontier to
a rough-hewn new city that was
just as lawless, albeit in differ-
ent ways.
Tacoma was a new port city
that serviced a growing blue-
water sailing fl eet, and although
its waterfront sordidness was
not yet in a class with Portland
or Astoria, it was catching up
fast. In his memoirs, Wells re-
counts an early-1880s incident
that would have been worthy
of Portland’s legendary Joseph
“Bunco” Kelley: It seems a
boardinghouse operator named
Brown stole a corpse from the
local undertaker’s parlor and,
representing it as a drunk sailor
sleeping soundly in the forecas-
tle, cashed it in for a $10 “blood
money” bonus from a ship cap-
tain.
So that was the scene in which
the longshoremen in Wells’ of-
fi ce earned their daily bread.
Like most West Coast 1880s
waterfront workers, they were
hard-punching, hard-drinking,
bluff and hearty men, as quick
with a joke as they were with a
fi st, but sentimental in ways that
a modern reader might not ex-
pect. The untimely loss of their
friend had hit them hard, and
they wanted to do right by him
– to say their goodbyes and send
him off with what they consid-
ered to be proper respect.
Wells was, of course, happy
to help. He followed the dock-
workers back to a rough, cheap
saloon in Old Town Tacoma,
where he found the drowned
man laid out in a room upstairs.
“There was a staircase run-
ning down into the saloon
from the room and a stream of
longshoremen passing up and
down,” Wells writes in his mem-
oirs. “The group around the
body was weeping and saying,
‘Poor Bill, he was a fi ne fellow,
poor Bill; let’s have a drink,’ and
down they would go into the sa-
loon below. When they came up
again they would be still more
The Rt. Rev. Lemuel Wells
as he appeared in the
early 1920s, from a photo
published in Up to the
Times Magazine in 1923.
grief-stricken. Each visit to the
bar would increase their tears
and call out longer eulogies and
greater professions of sorrow. I
said to the president of the long-
shoreman’s union, ‘We’d better
begin right away or these fel-
lows will be too drunk to attend
the funeral.’”
Accordingly, the president
called for order; Wells led the
mostly-sozzled mourners in
a calming prayer; pallbearers
were selected, and the dreary
burden was taken up. Down
the stairs they solemnly went,
through the saloon and out to
the waiting hearse.
But when the pallbearers went
to climb into the hack that had
been brought to carry them to
Trinity Church for the funeral,
they found their seats had been
hijacked by drunken longshore-
men, who stubbornly refused to
give them up.
Protracted negotiations en-
sued with the president of the
union. These talks ended with
the president agreeing to pro-
vide hacks for the members
so that they would not have to
walk.
That worked fi ne for getting
this particular crew of squatters
out of the pallbearers’ seats. But
by this time there were a lot of
longshoremen on the scene, and
even if the union president could
have swung it fi nancially, he
couldn’t have found and hired
enough hacks for all of them to
ride. Some of them were still
going to have to walk.
So when the hired hacks
started to appear, there followed
a huge, drunken melee among
aspirants to their seats.
“They all tried to get into the
fi rst one, and a free fi ght ensued,
and when the cab was fi lled they
dragged off the driver and two
mounted the box and drove off,”
Wells recounts. “The crowd
made a rush for the next vehicle
and so on until they were all
(fi lled).”
Salvaging some dignity for
the solemn occasion was doubt-
less a little diffi cult after that
display, but Wells did his best,
and soon the funeral procession
of hijacked cabs was on its pon-
derous way through the streets
of Tacoma, surrounded by re-
sentful, footsore longshoremen
exchanging hostile glares with
their comfortably seated com-
rades.
Upon arrival at the church,
the pallbearers declined to leave
their seats and take up their sor-
rowful burden. They knew the
minute they did so, their envi-
ous comrades would pounce
upon those coveted seats, and
they’d have to walk the rest of
the way.
So Wells and his undertakers,
joined by the president of the
union, lugged the body into the
church, and Wells preached the
funeral service to the rows of
empty pews, while the members
of the congregation eyed one
another warily in the parking lot
outside.
“On returning with the body
to replace it in the hearse, we
saw the men all grimly seated
in the carriages waiting for us,”
Wells recalls. “When we arrived
at the grave nobody would get
out of the carriages, so the un-
dertakers and I had to bury the
deceased.”
Once the graveside service
was preached, and Wells and his
helpers were throwing dirt onto
the top of the coffi n, the men in
the hacks drove off, followed
by the longshoremen on foot
– leaving to Wells and his help-
ers the task of moving about
fi ve cubic yards of earth into the
open grave.
This kept them busy for some
time – probably half an hour
or so. Afterward, they climbed
aboard their hearse and started
back toward the church.
But before they even got out
of the cemetery, they saw some-
thing that has to have provoked
a curse word or two from even
a mild, kindhearted man of the
cloth like Lemuel Wells:
“Just outside the cemetery
gate there were a number of
roadhouses, as they were called
– disreputable places with bars
for the sale of liquor,” Wells
writes. “When we reached the
9A
roadhouses, the carriages were
all standing empty in front of
them.”
The fact that none of those
grim riders clinging stubbornly
to their seats in the hijacked
cabs would bestir themselves
to help bury their friend, even
though the roadhouses were just
a few hundred yards away from
the cemetery gates, has to have
rankled Wells. And although
he claims no responsibility for
what followed, it’s hard not to
wonder if he perhaps had a little
something to do with it:
“Just then something startled
one of the teams,” he writes,
somewhat coyly; “which ran
away and ran into the next one
and started that and so on down
the line till they were all run-
ning at top speed; running into
one another and wrecking and
making sad havoc. The long-
shoremen’s union had to pay
several hundred dollars for the
damage.”
Wouldn’t you just love to
know exactly what that “some-
thing” was?
(Sources: Bromberg, Erik.
“Frontier Humor: Plain and Fan-
cy,” Oregon Historical Quarter-
ly, Sept. 1960; Wells, Lemuel H.
A Pioneer Missionary. Seattle:
Progressive Publishing, 1930)
Finn J.D. John teaches at
Oregon State University and
writes about odd tidbits of Or-
egon history. For details, see
http://fi nnjohn.com. To contact
him or suggest a topic: fi nn2@
offbeatoregon.com or 541-357-
2222.
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