by Johanna L. Hardesty
(©2019 by Johanna L. Hardesty. All rights reserved.)
[This is the transcript of a slide talk presented to the Columbia Falls Historical Society of Columbia Falls, Montana, on 27 February 2020. It has been slightly edited. Mr. Talbott was the founder of Columbia Falls, Montana]
Something to keep in mind whenever you are involved with historical research is that today's certainties are tomorrow's forgotten mistakes. Historical research by it's very nature is always looking under new rocks and into darker, dustier corners and uncovering surprising, enlightening and sometimes disappointing bits of information. So with that in mind, do not be surprised if next time you hear the life story of James Asbury Talbott discussed, you hear many things you will not hear today for I have not even begun to probe all of the possible dusty corners surrounding this enigmatic man.
Today, the world seems to measure greatness by whether a person’s name is blazoned across the headlines or whether we can open up a dusty old tome and see him staring back at us. Greatness seems to have become synonymous with notoriety. But I submit to you that there is another more accurate standard by which we can measure the true greatness of a man and it has nothing to do with whether or not his name has ever been in print.
It has been said that a bad man draws a circle around himself and defends it against all comers and that a good man draws a circle around himself and brings into it his family and closest friends. In contrast to both of these, a great man draws a much larger circle and brings into it not only his family and close friends, but his neighbors and acquaintances and even total strangers. Within this circle he provides for, protects and sustains them as well as he possibly can for as long as he can.
Using this method of evaluation, at the end of this presentation I will let you decide whether or not James Asbury Talbott was a bad, a good or a great man.
What’s in a name? While Juliet might have felt that a name mattered nothing concerning the man who bore it, our culture has never felt that way. A name is many things to us. It is our heritage to be taken from our forebears and passed on to our children. It identifies who we are on our birth certificate and celebrates us on our death certificate. It proves our legal ownership to property and establishes our right to vote. A name with good deeds attached to it is to be honored and protected. A name with bad deeds attached to it is to be reviled and shunned.
If a man loses his name he loses a part of himself that can never be replaced, for a name holds a man’s place in history, linking him to the past and the future. A man without a name is forever hidden behind a vale of uncertainty, confusion and wildest speculation.
So, given the importance of a name in our culture, why would a man intentionally render himself virtually nameless by constantly changing the spelling of his own name?
The man who bore the name James Asbury Talbott from his birth in 1838 until his death in 1923, signed his own name seemingly at will on various legal documents as Talbott with two Ts or Talbot with one T. Now while a T or lack thereof seems a small thing, it is not. For example James Asbury Talbott with two Ts was born in Ohio in 1838 while James Asbury Talbot with one T was born in 1840 in Maryland and both men were alive and well and living in the territory that would become the state of Montana in 1867. Lucky, for Montana history, it was not too difficult to prove the James Asbury Talbot was actually a dentist living in Virginia City while James Asbury Talbott was living in Bear Creek. Lucky as well, for the man who was the godfather of Columbia Falls, Montana that his name alternate, Talbot with one T, was an honest God fearing man as that worthy could have walked into several banks and mining claims offices and walked out with well over half of the godfather’s fortune with the proof of his birth certificate alone. A single T is a very dangerous thing to loose.
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| James A. Talbott The only known publicly available photo. |
To piece together the life of James Asbury Talbott is a very difficult task. He was not only “somewhat reluctant to give his history,” as Joaquin Miller stated in his book, An Illustrated History of the State of Montana,[1] Talbott was as close mouthed as a clam. To say that he was secretive about his private life is to belabor the obvious. In an age when wealthy men were well known, written about and well photographed, Talbott is seen in only one photograph in the public domain and there are no photos of his wife. Only two photos of his children are known: one of his daughter Maud from the Woman’s page of the Kalispell Bee in 1903 and the photo used for the obituary of his youngest daughter, Clarissa. Until he moved to Butte City, Montana, there is little evidence of him even in the newspapers. James was a man who intentionally lived in the shadows.
In this situation, researchers have to start with what we know and then move on to the family’s stories and try to prove or disprove them by any documentation available.
To begin, James Asbury Talbott was born in Lebanon, Meigs County, Ohio on October 30, 1838. He was the third of six children born to Joshua Owen Talbott and his first wife Adeline Louise Williamson. His father’s line can be traced back to one Richard Talbott of Poplar Knowle, Anne Arundel county Maryland, who married Elizabeth Ewen on Dec. 10, 1656. Where this Richard came from is not yet known. The Talbotts of James’ line remained in Maryland, good Quakers all, until his grandfather, Lt. Richard Talbott, a revolutionary war veteran, left his Quaker faith and his home state to move his growing family to Washington County, Pennsylvania in 1790 shortly after his first wife died and he married again. He eventually had eighteen children by his two wives. All his eleven children by his second wife, Temperence Wells, were born in Pennsylvania. He then moved the family once more, this time to Ohio. James’s father Joshua was Lt Richard’s seventeenth child and ninth born son.
Joshua O. Talbott kept his family in Ohio until 1854 when he moved them to Kansas City, Missouri. There he bought land and began to farm again. They retained ownership of their land in Meigs County Ohio as well. James was sixteen at the time and the first Talbott family story recalls that he only stayed a few months in Missouri then set out on his own to California to make his fortune. However, it was not son James who left Missouri at this time, but his father Joshua. James appears in the household of his mother Adeline in Kansas City, Missouri until after the 1860 census was taken. So far I have not found any divorce documents, so it is likely Joshua deserted his family and farming for more adventurous activities.
The second Talbott family story is that James went as a mercenary soldier with William Walker, a Louisiana lawyer and adventurer, when that worthy sailed from San Francisco, California to Nicaragua in 1855 to found a new colony and set himself up as president. Walker was backed by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt who was operating the transportation network across Central America in the days before the Panama canal. Walker was able to recruit men by promising them land in his new colony. He sailed on May 3, 1855. Again, documents prove that it was not James who went with Walker, but the timing is right for his father Joshua, as the man disappears from the legal records in 1854 and does not reappear until he joined the 16th Kansas Cavalry on Nov 22, 1863.
The third family story that does not add up is that James went to Australia as a “sailor before the mast” as in he worked his way across on a sailing vessel. According to the story, James was with the Walker Expedition from 1859-1860, Walker’s second expedition to Nicaragua. The expedition was defeated and Walker executed. Supposedly James then walked across Nicaragua and boarded a ship for Australia. He arrived there just before the big gold strike at Ballarat. There are several problems with this story: first, the big gold strike in Ballarat was in 1851 not 1860; next, it took a sailing ship four to six months to reach Australia in 1860 and James shows up in Montana in 1863, according to Joaquin Miller’s history of Montana published in 1894. That date is pretty solid as the book was written during James’ lifetime and thus he could have refuted the details.
The question becomes how did James Asbury Talbott, between leaving Missouri in 1860—remember, he was living with his mother at that time—and getting to Montana in 1863, manage to spend a year getting to and from Australia, look around the gold fields of Australia, go to California and make a fortune, move on to Virginia City, Nevada Territory and loose said fortune and then get up to the Montana goldfields at Alder Gulch and start digging??? A very Talented fellow, yes? Well, he was a talented fellow, but I don't think he was quite that talented. From the above, it is apparent that James’ father, Joshua, was the adventurous one, not James, and those tales told of James were really about his father.
So what was James really doing between 1860 and 1863, how did he get to Montana and what did he do once he got here?
First of all, let us remember that in 1860 he is confirmed as living with his mother in Kansas City, Missouri, helping to support his younger brothers and sister. He is listed as a laborer and literate and described as well over six feet tall and brown haired. Also that year, he and his mother appear on a list of people who were in arrears on their property taxes back in Meigs County, Ohio.
Now the fourth Talbott family story is plausible in both time and place if not in detail. According to the story, when James got back from Australia, he arrived in San Francisco and promptly imported camels to use as beasts of burden to freight goods to the gold fields of Nevada. At this point, reality meets story as there really were camel drovers working out of San Francisco at that time. The original source of the camels was not James Asbury Talbott but the US Army who had done a grand experiment with importing camels and using them as beasts of burden for the army in Arizona. The experiment did not succeed for several reasons, chief among them was that its main proponent was Jefferson Davis who right in the middle of things had the unmitigated brass to become the President of the Confederate States of America. The camels were ultimately either sold or turned loose in the desert.
A number of the camels were purchased by two gentlemen from San Francisco who did indeed put them to work hauling mail, provisions and salt to the mining camps in the Nevada Territory. So James could indeed have gotten to Virginia City, Nevada on the back of a camel, but how and when he arrived in California in the first place—if in fact he did—is not known.
Assuming he was in California, did James make a fortune by mining there? Probably not, as the great gold rush ended there in 1855 and he was probably busy learning how to handle camels sometime after August of 1860. According to a major series of law suits in which he was involved from 1890 to 1905 James Asbury Talbott never mined at all, so how did he make his first fortune?
When I say he never mined, I do not mean he was not involved in mining, as there are several hundred land deeds in his name, with both one T and two T’s, for mineral rights in Montana. At one time he and his various partners owned all the mineral rights to the entire town site of Butte.
According to the lawsuits, James did not mine the ground, he mined the miners. It is documented that he either owned or at least operated gambling hells in Virginia City, Nevada, and in Montana Territory, Bannack, Virginia City, Butte, Deer Lodge, Diamond City, Bear Creek and he appears to have been a shadow partner in a gambling hell in Garnet. In 1870 it is recorded that James sold his establishment in Bear Creek to Jacob E. Van Gundy, formerly of Idaho. A gambling hell was an establishment that provided booze, gambling and women to the miners or any other male who desired such entertainments.
Having once operated gambling hells is a good reason for a Victorian Age gentleman to be, as Joaquin Miller stated about James, “somewhat reluctant to give his history.”
As to why he left Virginia City, Nevada penniless as the family story has it, there are several possibilities, most of which are speculation in newspaper articles of the day involving his disappearing out the back door of a gambling hell in the middle of the night with only what he was wearing and a smoking gun or bloody knife in his hand.
No matter why he came or what condition his finances were in when he arrived in Montana, the first documented evidence of his presence in the state has him operating a gambling hell in upper Deer Lodge valley in 1864.
James continued to add to the number of gambling hells in which he was involved and put as much money as he could into buying mining patents in all of the major mining sites in the territory, most especially in the area that would become Butte. This pattern continued until he decided to make a major change in his life. He decided to “set up his nursery” as per the vernacular of his time, that is, he decided to get married. On July 26, 1875, he married the daughter of an old friend, Joseph Ramsdell. Jocella Lovina Ramsdell[2] was sixteen years old on her wedding day and her husband was thirty-seven. They set up housekeeping in upper Deer Lodge Valley where their first child, May, was born on May 1, 1876.
James and Jose’s family grew by another child as she bore him a son on Dec 10,1877, but the child died on Jan. 6, 1879. In the records of Cascade County his name is recorded as Buddy. In one of the obituaries of James it says that he had seven children but I have been only able to establish six:
May born in 1876
Buddy (James?) born in 1877
Maud Lovina born in 1879
Josella Ramsdell “Jose/Josie/Dode” born in 1881
Louisa born in 1883
Clarissa Ramsdell born in 1885
There is also listed a child named James but I can find no record of either his birth or his death. I can’t help wondering if James and Buddy are not the same child, as Buddy is usually a nick-name.
It is interesting that the circle James had drawn around himself once he left home had been concerned with himself only and with a vengeance, though he probably kept in contact with his mother or siblings as there were letters from the east waiting for him on at least two occasions at the Helena post office, once in 1866 and then again in 1867. Once he married Jose, as she was called, he enlarged his circle, but only to include his wife and children as they came. But he kept this circle as strongly guarded as any medieval castle, as he did not allow his family to live in any town in which he operated an active gambling hell. He sold his operation in Deer Lodge in 1877 before moving his family to that place. He opened an establishment in Butte City in 1876 and ran it until April of 1883 when he sold it. The Butte City hell was the last of his gambling establishments.
The 1880s saw James once again changing the direction of his life. As he was now a husband and father, it was time to repaint himself as an upstanding member of society. To this end, he built what was considered the first frame house in Butte in 1880, but would not allow his family to move into it until the week of June 8, 1883. That date was after his gambling hell had been sold and the transaction reported in the legal section of the newspaper. Prior to that date, his family continued to live in Deer Lodge while he went back and forth to Butte.
During the three years prior to moving his young family, James was not idle in setting up the way to develop his new reputation. He joined Andrew Jackson Davis, the elder, and Samuel T. Hauser, a prominent and wealthy merchant of Helena, in founding the First National Bank of Butte city in 1881. James was a founding member, but not yet an officer, as he was still involved with gambling and it was very important that the source of his money not be questioned. By 1884 he apparently felt comfortable enough in his new position in society as a mine owner and upstanding family man that he allowed himself to be appointed the Vice-president of the bank when A. J. Davis bought out Hauser.
Once James was set in his new life in Butte, he concentrated on taking good care of the bank, his family and his mining interests. From 1880s to nearly the end of his life, he was involved in law suit after law suit to protect the bank, his mineral rights and mining interests. At one time, he and several partners were suing the entire town of Butte for infringement of their mineral rights.
During the time James lived in Butte, two daughters were born to his family: Louisa in 1883 and Clarissa in 1885. Sadly the Talbott family again lost a child in 1885 as Louisa died on January 9th of diphtheria.
In Butte, James enlarged his circle to include its first outsider, a man who would become one of his best friends, Andrew J. Davis (the younger), nephew of the co-founder of the First National Bank. The elder Andrew Jackson Davis was also a long time partner of Talbott’s in the mining industry. Together they owned the Silver Bow group of mines in Butte. They sold this group in August of 1888 for $1,250,00.00 dollars which is equivalent to $33,274,342.11 in today’s money.
Andy, as Andrew Jackson Davis the younger was called by his friends, was inadvertently the cause of the worst series of lawsuits and biggest scandal that James Asbury Talbott was ever involved in. This series of lawsuits would run from the time of A. J. Davis the elder’s death in 1890 until a final suit was brought to court and thrown out in 1905. The issue was caused by the fact that A. J. Davis the elder died without a will and as he was one of the wealthiest men in the entire northwest, the vultures circled fast and hard. At the heart of the matter was the ownership of the controlling stock of the bank. According to Andy, who was at that time a cashier at the bank, his uncle had given him 950 shares of the bank’s stock making him the majority stock holder. James was appointed the executor of the estate despite the conflict of interest in his own position at the bank.
By the time the main law suit was settled, Andy had control of the bank and James had lost what he most prized as a husband and father, his reputation. In 1894, Joaquin Miller stated in his book that James “ by strict attention to business and by honorable and upright dealings ... has accumulated a large property and has also made what is far better, a good name.” By 1898, things had changed. In the testimony of the re-opened law suit, the new state of affairs was revealed. A certain William Wilson, a former partner of James’s in the gambling hell in Deer Lodge, was on the stand and the questioning went as follows:
“Do you know Mr Talbot’s reputation in Butte for truth?”
“It is no good.”
“You do know it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is Mr Talbot’s reputation for truth?”
“It’s bad.”
“Bad?”
“Very bad.”
The final blow to James’s reputation in Butte was the suicide of his son-in-law, Henry A. Neidenhofen. Neidenhofen married had May Talbott on October 20, 1896. Then, while on his honeymoon trip to Salt Lake, he was suffering severe depression and on January 1, 1897, either slipped and fell or jumped from the top of the hotel in which he and his new wife were staying. He was the Clerk of the District Court for Silver Bow County, in which capacity it is believed that James forced him into bribing the judges and fixing not only the lawsuit itself but paying bribes in Helena to “kill the bill that would have increased the number of judges so that Andy Davis could have the bank.” It is supposed that James gave Neidenhofen $19,000.00 to do what was necessary.
Whether he was guilty of anything other than accepting the executor position for the Davis’s estate when he really knew he should not have or not, James was nothing if not a survivor. As the song says, he “knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.” He obviously knew things were going to get ugly in Butte so between March 11, 1890, when A. J. Davis the elder died and November, 1890, James organized himself and six of his friends to begin looking west to the Flathead country with its timber and coal as their next place of business.
In November of 1890, James and his six friends, including Andy Davis and Jared Gaylord, incorporated three corporations: Flathead Valley Coal and Iron Company, with $500,000.00 in capital stock; Great Northern Lumber Company, with $500,000.00 in capital stock; and Northern International Improvement Company, with $5,000,000.00 in capital stock. By May 1891 the Improvement Company had already bought the land that would be platted as Columbia Falls City from the half-breed son of a man named La Fromboise and begun to advertise their new town.
James Asbury Talbott was not one to make the same mistake twice and he threw his heart and soul into making his reputation sterling and a new home for his family. Even as he was working with Fred Whiteside, of the William A. Clark election fiasco,[3] to design and build the most beautiful home his wife and daughters had ever enjoyed, he was widening his circle by looking to the interests of the new town. Everything of importance to the well being of the town of Columbia Falls, from the bank to the water company, were put into his wife Jose L. Talbott’s name, thus assuring that nothing of the law suits forever continuing in Butte could spill over and taint Columbia Falls. If James A. Talbott did not own it, it could not be touched if he lost a lawsuit.
From the 1890s to the end of his life, James’ comings and goings, and those of his family are well documented in the social and legal pages of newspapers, most especially the Kalispell Bee and the Anaconda Standard. Even the lawsuit brought against the Northern International Improvement Company on September 11, 1900, to try to claim title to the Columbia Falls town site was described at length in the Kalispell Bee. James no longer tried to keep to the shadows; he wanted light on his activities and lots of it.
James moved his wife and daughters into the newly built and magnificent 19-room Shellrock Manor situated on its 200 acres overlooking the Flathead river in 1894. It was a three story showplace with no expense spared in its construction. It cost $38,000 to build at the same time C. E. Conrad built his mansion in Kalispell for $9,000. One can only imagine what it must have been like in its glory.
While his family lived in Columbia Falls and only visited Butte occasionally, James was forced to spend the vast majority of his time in Butte until 1908 when he sold his house there and his interest in the First National Bank. His wife and daughters fully enjoyed life in the Flathead which included not only excursions to the opera house and extended visits with friends in Kalispell and elsewhere, but hunting and fishing expeditions as well. Both Clarissa and her sister Jose were fine shots and each had her own corner of the great hall at Shellrock to display the results of their prowess including mountain goats from the heights above Lake McDonald in what is now Glacier National Park. Life in Columbia Falls was everything James could have wished for his family. All of his girls were treated to the joys of travel as well as they were all able to go on the Grand Tour of Europe. Mrs. Neidenhofen (the oldest girl, May) went more than once as she was eager to show her younger sisters the delights of the old world. Daughter Clarissa was a frequent visitor to the Conrad mansion in Kalispell and counted Catherine Conrad among her friends.[4]
Though the Northern International Improvement Company technically owned the land in and around Columbia Falls, it was James who had the deciding vote as to what was done. So he was responsible for donating 160 acres of townsite property to the west of his Shellrock holding for the building of the Soldiers Home. Likewise, he made sure that the company provided the new town with a cemetery. Nothing needed for the town was beyond his means of either funding or persuasion. He even built a magnificent hotel which he named for his good friend and partner, Jared Gaylord. While James was listed as the proprietor, again his wife Jose actually owned it. Everything was turning to gold in his hands for Columbia Falls. All except one thing. There was one failure in all of his plans for Columbia Falls and that failure was spectacular.
In1891, James conceived the idea of building a steamboat and sailing it up the Flathead river to the coal seams of the North Fork and thus providing another industry for his adopted town. He had talked long and hard with river and lake captains throughout the Flathead valley and the consensus was that the project could be done if the boat was sent up river during the spring flood. Always game for a try, James commissioned the T.J. Oaks to be built in 1892 and the vessel set out in May of 1893 under the command of Captain Frisby, a man of whom it was said that he could make a steamboat dance a hornpipe. Also on board were eight crewmen and a cook. Nothing loath, James Asbury Talbott was also on board.
Whether the venture was a piece of extreme bravery or extreme stupidity or just plain insanity is something open to speculation, as the Flathead River is considered one of the most dangerous in the northwest due to its many rapids, whirlpools and box canyons. Needless to say, the steamboat survived only to just above Canyon Creek where the cable they had been using to tow it to aid the propeller against the swiftness of the current, snapped. The Oaks turned sideways in the river and the current neatly capsized her. The last people off were Captain Frisby and James. The rest had managed to swim to safety as the steamboat was swinging. Frisby and James climbed up onto the keel that was now pointing to the stars of a cold Montana spring night. The men on shore were able to throw them the remains of the broken cable and thus all were saved. The next morning saw some very surprised residents of Belton when the bedraggled sailors showed up on their doorstep. That was the one and only attempt to navigate the upper Flathead.
As the new century dawned, Columbia Falls continued to prosper, but alas, the Talbott family did not. In 1904 at the age of 23, James’s daughter Josella died. 1907 saw the death of his daughter Clarissa, also in just her 23rd year. In 1909 his beloved wife Jose passed away after a three month illness. Silence echoed through the halls of Shellrock Manor. His remaining daughters, Maud and May, the widowed Mrs. Neidenhofen, married Dr. Lamb and T. E. Linden respectively. May and her husband continued to live at Shellrock for many years and their two sons were a great joy to James in his remaining years.
Many residents of Columbia Falls remember James as the gentle old fellow who sat on a bench in front of the drug store and handed out candy to the children and told them stories of their town. In the spring of 1923 James’s daughters and their husbands went to court in Flathead County and had him declared non-compos mentis and his guardianship was given to Dr. Lamb and T.E. Linden, thus giving them power over his business affairs as well. James passed away at his daughter May’s home in Spokane, Washington, on August 2, 1923 at the age of 84.
It was a long and winding road from Lebanon, Meigs County, Ohio to Woodlawn cemetery in Columbia Falls, Montana, but James Asbury Talbott walked that road with determination and pride and with apologies to no man.
IT HAS BEEN SAID that a bad man draws a circle around himself and defends it against all comers and that a good man draws a circle around himself and brings into it his family and closest friends. In contrast to both of these, a great man draws a much larger circle and brings into it not only his family and close friends but his neighbors and acquaintances and even total strangers. Within this circle he provides for, protects and sustains them as well as he possibly can for as long as he can.
Using this method of evaluation, I will now let you decide whether or not James Asbury Talbott was a bad, a good or a great man.
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NOTES
1. Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1894.
2. Also known as Josie and Jose, which latter name is on her tombstone.
3. Whiteside, Fred A. Three Hundred Grand, the Highlights of One Man’s Life. Bozeman, MT: Estate of Fred Whiteside, [1980]. 105 pp.
4. She appears in the diary of a Margaret Shelton, a close friend of Kate Conrad’s who virtually lived with the them and was treated as part of the family. See Daisy: The Other Conrad Daughter.
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