Bing Crosby Read online

  Sealing the family’s bargain with the New World, Catherine Harrigan, in her early forties, gave birth on September 6, 1832, to her eleventh child, the only one born in North America, Dennis Jr. It would have greatly surprised Bing Crosby to learn that his maternal grandfather was Canadian; he assumed he was Irish born, and wrote as much in his memoir and on his mother’s death certificate. 15 (When Bing attempted to trace the family line during a visit to Ireland, he was thwarted by his certainty in the matter.) 16 If Dennis Sr. embodied the trials of transatlantic resettlement, his son — born in New Brunswick and baptized at St. Patrick’s in Miramichi — would personify the westward journey into and across the United States.

  By 1835 his family, like so many of Williamstown’s interconnected tribes, was earning much of its livelihood from logging and timber. The desirable riverfront land had been taken by previous settlers, but the rigors of clearing tracts acclimated the newcomers and taught them to survive the wilderness. Protestants and Catholics often worked together, united by the hostile environment. Dennis Harrigan’s appointment as overseer of highways in 1839 affirmed the increasingly significant Catholic presence. But the old enmities persisted. Catholics were characterized as criminal or rowdy and were severely punished; one man was hanged for stealing twenty-five pennies and a loaf of bread. Catholic children had to travel long distances to escape the schooling of Methodist crusaders. The first Catholic teacher, James Evers, hired in 1846, was falsely accused of sexually molesting a Methodist student and was fired. A petition attesting to his “good moral character” was signed by thirteen parents of Williamstown, including Dennis Harrigan. 17 Evers spent two years futilely defending himself, then cleared out in 1849, at which time the Court of General Sessions at Newcastle concluded that he was a man of “moral and sober habits” and “taught to our satisfaction.”

  Evers’s calamity prefigured that of Williamstown. As Great Britain reduced tariffs on timber from the Baltic countries, New Brunswick’s timber industry declined. Town merchants foreclosed on their debts. Opportunities in the western United States lured away the settlers’ children. The Williamstown settlement would be little remembered today but for the inordinate number of eminent Americans whose New World roots are in those woods. 18 Dennis Harrigan’s descendants alone include, among his grandsons, William and John Harrigan, who built the Scotch Lumber Company in Fulton, Alabama; Emmett Harrigan, head of a major law firm in St. Paul and an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate; and Ellen Sauntry’s brazen Miramichi-raised son, William Sauntry Jr., the millionaire lumber baron of Stillwater, Minnesota, known as “the King of the St. Croix,” whose garish mansion, the Alhambra, stands today as a Stillwater tourist attraction. Dennis’s great-grandsons include Lyman Sutton, president of Stillwater’s Cosmopolitan State Bank; Gordon Neff, whose chain stores introduced supermarkets to Los Angeles; Colonel Bill Harrigan, who helped rescue the First World War’s “Lost Battalion” in the Argonne Forest; bandleader Bob Crosby; and Bing.

  Dennis and Catherine passed away within a few years of each other and are presumably buried in a churchyard’s unmarked graves in Red Bank, on the Miramichi River. They were almost certainly gone by 1866, the year several of their children, now in their thirties and forties, left for Maine, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Dennis Jr., however, remained another fifteen months. 19 After attending school in Williamstown and Red Bank, he tried his hand at various jobs. While working as a logger in Newcastle and later as a brewer, he boarded in the home of a friend, Michael Ahearn. In 1867, the year the Dominion of Canada was chartered, he married Ahearn’s sister, Katie. Within weeks the couple headed south through Maine and across to Stillwater, Minnesota.

  Dennis Jr., one of the most industrious and devout of his father’s sons (two or three brothers were thought to be ne’er-do-wells and were probably alcoholic), eventually earned a reputation as a reliable, proficient contractor and builder, specializing in church architecture. Stillwater provided a congenial setting for him to hone his skills; many Miramichi families, including three of his siblings, had been drawn to the prosperous logging and rafting enterprises on the St. Croix River. He also continued with his wife, Katie, the custom of large families. Married in their thirties, the two produced five boys and two girls between 1867 and 1879. 20 They remained in Stillwater until the last was born.

  According to the Crosby genealogy written by Larry Crosby (Bing’s oldest brother), it was Katie who advanced the family’s musical calling. In his account, she “not only baked a wonderful pie, but sang like a bird, and it was common gossip when she was out rowing on the lake, that either Katie Harrigan or an angel is out there singing.” Her boys were raised to be practical. In Larry’s account, Dennis “wisely brought up four of his sons to be respectively [a] lather, plumber, plasterer and electrician. They could build a house or win a fight, without any outside help.” Singing was a pastime, hardly a profession. Two grandchildren of Ellen Sauntry, Dennis Jr.’s older sister, “won renown on the stage,” to the chagrin of their parents, who considered acting “unmoral.”

  Katie managed to pass on her love of singing to at least one child, her fourth-born and first daughter, Catherine Helen Harrigan, who was delivered on February 7, 1873, in a boarding room above an old creamery. 21 This Catherine also inherited her father’s pious diligence. When her own children — Bing among them — were middle-aged, they reminisced about her “sweet, clear voice” 22 and took care not to smoke, drink, or swear in her presence. A childhood photograph of Catherine reveals a comely round-faced girl who looks nothing like the severe image she presented in later years. In her large, pale eyes, one can see her mother’s penetrating stare and her father’s hooded lids, both of which she passed on to her most famous son.

  A year or two after Catherine was born, the Harrigans moved into a large boardinghouse on Main Street. Many of its thirty or so tenants were from New Brunswick. Dennis probably owned part of the house, but in 1879, when the youngest of his children, George, was born, he was able to secure a home of his own on Second Street, where he took in boarders to bolster his income. In 1881, finding increasingly limited opportunities in Stillwater, he moved the family to St. Paul. Before the year was out, he relocated again, to Knife Falls (now Cloquet), near Duluth, where his fortunes improved. He built that town’s first Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, as well as a school, and was appointed a church trustee. In 1885, with his reputation as a builder secure, Dennis took his family back to St. Paul for three years. There Catherine, now twelve, and her brother Edward spent their afternoons at the ice palace, he making and she demonstrating ice skates. They were obliged to earn their keep beyond essentials, a Harrigan practice that Catherine, who could skate her name on ice, instilled in her own children.

  The West had lured many Miramichi families, including a few of Dennis’s uncles and aunts, by the time he succumbed. Most had relocated to Washington and Wisconsin, drawn by the booming economies set in motion by land speculators and lumber barons. Dennis chose Tacoma, a seaport on Puget Sound, about twenty-five miles south of Seattle, where the lumber industry increased the population tenfold in the 1880s. A boom was predicted when the Northern Pacific Railroad named Tacoma its terminus, and in 1884 the city was incorporated from two smaller boroughs of the same name. Signs of progress — electric lights, warehouses, shipways, a hospital — reflected the influx of thousands of blue-collar families drawn by the promise of cheap lumber and land. No city in the nation boasted a higher percentage of families who owned their own homes. Not even the scourge of racial violence halted growth; in fact, it may have helped. Tacoma created international headlines when a mob led by city officials rounded up 200 Chinese residents at gunpoint and forced them to board southbound trains. The United States was forced to pay China an indemnity, but the specter of competitive, minimally paid labor had been subdued.

  In 1888 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its pass through the Cascade Mountains and sold 90,000 acres of timberland to the St. Paul and T
acoma Lumbering Company, which built a sawmill on the tidal flats of Commencement Bay. That year Dennis and his eldest son, William, decided to make their move. Boarding in a Tacoma rooming house, they worked as carpenters until they earned enough to buy a place that could accommodate Katie and the children, who arrived a year later. Dennis was fifty-seven, old for carpentry, but he soon established himself as a contractor and built several notable structures, including Seattle’s Hull Building and Tacoma’s Aquinas Academy annex, Scandinavian Church, and Dominican Sisters convent.

  All but the two youngest children helped keep the Harrigans solvent. William, twenty-three in 1890, worked alongside his father as a lather until he hired on as a streetcar conductor for the Tacoma Rail and Motor Company; Ambrose, twenty-one, was foreman for an electrical-supplies concern; Edward, twenty, worked as a plumber; Catherine, who at seventeen was called Kate, fashioned and sold hats for the G. W. H. Taylor millinery company; her fifteen-year-old sister, Annie, worked at home as a dressmaker; at thirteen and eleven, respectively, Frank and George helped with the chores.

  A few years later Kate took a job clerking at Sanford & Stone’s popular mercantile store on Tacoma Avenue and was designing hats for a branch of the company that staged amateur theatricals. 23 While appearing in one of those productions, she attracted the attention of an unlikely suitor: a mandolin-playing auditor for the Northern Pacific, Harry Lowe Crosby.

  2

  THE CROSBYS

  Like unto a saga of old, runs the story of the coming of the Crosby family into the West.

  — Mrs. George E. Blankenship (1914) 1

  By the time the Harrigans left Canada, the Crosbys had earned distinction in America, initially as seafarers based in New England. They made history sailing around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest. Mrs. Blankenship could not contain her enthusiasm in the chapter she devoted to the family’s accomplishments in her Early History of Thurston County, Washington. “In all the wild experiences related during the compilation of this book,” she wrote, “none were more picturesque and interesting than the history of an entire family of stalwart sons and fair daughters with their aged but sturdy father, coming with their own ship, laden with their own goods, their children and themselves, to take their part in conquering the wilderness.” 2

  In focusing on Washington State, she traced the Crosbys only as far back as the 1840s, when the illustrious Captain Nathaniel Crosby spurred and pioneered the territory. Larry Crosby’s genealogy dove centuries deeper into the paternal line, back to “Vikings and Catholics” who settled in Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. 3 Crosby is a Danish name, meaning “town of the cross” (Cros is a transposition of the Danish kors and by is a diminutive of the Danish burg).In his account, written with mock lofty diction and printed in faux Old English type, the first recorded Crosbys were of the Irish house of Ardfert, notably the Right Reverend John Crosbie, appointed bishop of Ardfert in 1601. The family spread out over western and middle Ireland to Kerry and Queens, as far north as Tyrone (home to a knight, Sir Pierce Crosby) and as far south as Cork, where the Harrigans also settled.

  The family’s conversion to Anglicism was coerced during the reign of Henry VIII and was eventually fully embraced. Edmundus Crosby served the king as cantorist at St. John’s in Doncaster, and Richard Crosby did likewise as auditor of St. John’s in York. 4 The first in the line to reach the New World, in 1635, was Simon, who bought a homestead in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through marriage, Simon’s progeny aligned the family twice over with descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims, who preceded him by fifteen years.

  In 1755 Deacon Nathaniel Crosby married into the brood of Elder William Brewster, a Mayflower alumnus whose family founded Brewster, Massachusetts, where many Crosbys lived until the early nineteenth century. 5 A generation later his grandson, Captain Nathaniel Crosby, the first in the family’s line of sea captains, married Ruby Foster, who traced her ancestry to another noted Mayflower passenger, Governor Winslow. Those ties earned Bing membership in the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. But Bing neglected to mention those relations in his 1953 as-told-to autobiography, Call Me Lucky, preferring to concentrate on the outstanding men of the sea.

  Yet, as Larry discovered, several Crosbys “distinguished themselves in the learned professions and as military leaders in the Revolutionary War.” Josiah Crosby, inadvertently overlooked by Larry, signed a declaration of the Continental Congress in Amherst in 1776 as a representative of New Hampshire. 6 The family’s most celebrated colonial, however, was Enoch Crosby, who joined the Continental Army at twelve as a spy and claimed to be the model for Harvey Birch, the undercover hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s bestselling 1821 novel, The Spy. Cooper testily denied Crosby’s claim: “I know nothing of such a man as Enoch Crosby, never having heard his name, until I saw it coupled with the character of the Spy, after my return from Europe.” 7 But on the evening C. P. Clinch’s adaptation of the novel opened at New York’s Park Theater (not ten weeks after the book was first published), Enoch appeared in his box to “thunders of applause.” 8 Cooper admitted he based his story on an anecdote told to him by Governor John Jay and subsequently conceded he never learned the name of the spy, because “Jay felt himself bound to secrecy.” 9 It is known that Jay arranged for Enoch Crosby to enlist as a spy in the British army, and that Enoch refused, Birch-like, his offer of a reward.

  Whether Crosby was the prototype for Birch (who exemplifies for Cooper’s General Washington “the patriotism that pervades the bosoms of [our] lowest citizens”), the twentieth-century Crosbys were proud to claim a hero of low estate, even as they vouched themselves two coats of arms. Somewhat defensively, Larry explained that heraldry “does not denote an aristocratic class, but rather personal merit secured by the humblest as well as the highest.” The motto of their Irish arms — depicting two hands, a lion, and three swords— is Indignante Invidia Florebit Justus (Despising envy, the just shall flourish). The English arms display three rams and the motto Liberty Under Thy Guidance, the Guidance of the Lamb of God. Bing preferred the Irish emblem, sporting it on the breast pockets of his blazers.

  Captain Nathaniel, known as Nathaniel Jr. or Nathaniel II, was the fourth Crosby of that name in a line that produced three or four more. 10 Born in 1810, in East Brewster, Massachusetts, he and his brothers, Clanrick and Alfred, were tutored in the seaman’s life by their father, who commanded a vessel out of Cape Cod. In his twenties, Nathaniel moved to Wiscasset, Maine, where he married Mary Lincoln and raised a family. By 1844 his reputation for daring had earned him a commission from a U.S. government agent to command the brig O. C. Raymond, charged with taking emergency supplies from Boston to immigrants who poured into the Oregon Territory seeking their fortunes. Reaching the mouth of the Columbia River, he continued to Portland, an outpost of log cabins, and put his crew ashore to build a warehouse for his cargo. That cabin survived as the settlement’s post office.

  Crosby took to the community, enchanted by the vitality of the frontier and the commercial promise it held, discerning for himself a role amid the burgeoning industries and direct trade routes to Hawaii — still known as the Sandwich Islands — and China. He decided to transport his family and made one last visit to New England to outline his plan. Over the next few years, Captain Crosby traded along the West Coast and Hawaii, ferrying supplies at government behest to secure the territory and earning enough money to enable his brothers to purchase the Grecian, a 247-ton brig. In September 1849, with twenty-four people on board, all but five of them relatives, the Grecian left New York. 11 Clanrick and Alfred served as captain and second officer. On board were their wives, children, in-laws, housekeeper, and their retired father, Captain Nathaniel Crosby Sr.

  Within five months the Crosby brig rounded the Horn and docked in Portland. The party continued to the small settlement of Tumwater. That town, incorporated three years earlier, consisted of little more than a blockhouse and a few one-room cabins. It became home to Clanrick and his family. In pa
rtnership with a man named Gray, Clanrick bought a gristmill and land along the river, eventually building a general store and emerging as a prominent citizen, a leader and philanthropist. His father also lived there a couple of years but returned to Cape Cod shortly before his death. Alfred moved his family to Astoria, Oregon.

  The man responsible for the emigration, Captain Nathaniel Crosby Jr., soon tired of sedentary life. Early in 1852 he transported his family — and the first cargo of spars (poles used in the rigging of ships) ever sent from the Pacific Coast — to China. After establishing a home in Hong Kong, he returned for a second consignment of spars, this time from Olympia, the growing settlement at Tumwater’s northern border, soon to be designated capital of Washington Territory. He died in Hong Kong four years later, leaving a widow; two daughters, Mary and Martha; and a son, Nathaniel. All but Martha quickly returned to Tumwater. 12

  Clanrick helped young Nat get on his feet, selling him a parcel of land at Tumwater’s north end and employing him at the mill. Nat took a wife, Cordelia, and prospered for a time, building a spacious, two-story A-frame house with a small cherry orchard out front. But a bad investment in steamships annihilated his savings, and he was forced to relocate to Olympia, where he found employment as postmaster. (Although they lived in the Tumwater house only a few years, it continued to be known as “the old Crosby home,” and in 1949 the deed was given to the local chapter of Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington in return for its restoration and preservation. 13 Bing contributed $1,800 toward the purchase and gave the Daughters two chairs his grandparents had owned when they lived in the house.) Nat and Cordelia raised two sons. Frank Lawrence, born in Tumwater in 1862, made a name for himself in the Puget Sound area as U.S. deputy marshall residing in Tacoma, thirty miles northeast; his brother, Harry Lowe, born in Olympia on November 28, 1870, developed a less exacting attitude toward life.