Lester Donovan Blake began his life with tragedy and ended it the same way. Born as the United States stood on the brink of one war, he died with the coming of another. His short sixteen years on earth saw his nation changing in enormous ways, even as he remained within the cocoon of his large and loving family, never touching history himself but never forgotten by those who came after him.
Lester Gumz was born on January 4, 1897, a typical Oshkosh winter day, with temperatures hovering around freezing and snow flurries in the air. The Oshkosh Northwestern newspaper published the day of Lester's birth was full of news about the intensifying struggles of the Cuban people against their Spanish colonizers, struggles that would eventually consume the American public until cries of "Cuba Libre" could be heard from jingoes across the nation and throughout the halls of Congress. In Washington, D.C., preparations were underway to celebrate the anniversary of the victory of Andrew Jackson over the British in the Battle of New Orleans, with special attention paid to Jackson's foray into Spanish-held Florida, just in case the news from Cuba was not enough to remind Americans of their contentious relationship with Spain.
The Kansas City, Pittsburgh & Gulf Railroad served notice that the completion of their line into Polk County, Arkansas, would open up the southwestern corner of that state to settlement. Strikes at mines in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Leadville, Colorado, gave a hint at the dangerous direction labor relations seemed to be taking at the close of the nineteenth century, a trend that would culminate for the citizens of Oshkosh in violent strikes at many of the city's lumber mills in 1898. In Madison, Captain Edward Scofield, a Civil War veteran who had been taken prisoner at the Battle of the Wilderness, was inaugurated as the nineteenth governor of Wisconsin.
Closer to home, S. Heyman & Company in Oshkosh advertised Scott's Emulsion of Cod Liver Oil for sale at only $.73 for a large bottle. The Continental Clothing House announced its "Midwinter Clearing Sale," at which savvy shoppers could buy a man's "Fine Fancy Cheviot and Cassimere Suit" for $7.88. And, at 346 10th Street, John Arza Blake and his wife, Ann Eva McCammond Blake, welcomed their eleventh child, a son they would name Lester Donovan.
John Arza Blake and Ann Eva McCammond had been married in Oshkosh on September 15, 1875. John Arza, born in Moriah, New York, in 1851, was just twenty-four when he married young Ann Eva McCammond, a Canadian by birth and only twenty-one at the time of her wedding. The couple wasted no time in beginning their large family, welcoming their children: John Orva (1877), Allie Buella (1878), Franklin (1880), James Harvey (1881), Ann Eva (1883), Elbert Percy (1885), Margaret (1887), Mary Octavia (1889), Willie Jay (1892), and Guy Evan (1894). With the birth of Lester in 1897, Ann Eva had been pregnant or caring for an infant for twenty of her forty-three years.
The toll on Ann Eva's body from the years of childbearing proved to be too much. Soon after the birth of Lester, Ann Eva's doctor diagnosed her with a case of peritonitis, an inflammation of the membrane lining of the abdomen. By January 14, 1897, Ann Eva McCammond Blake was gone, and her family was left with carry on without her.
John Arza did the best he could with the newborn Lester, undoubtedly relying on his older children to help with the younger. By June of 1900, his older sons John Orva, James Harvey, and Franklin had moved out on their own, but Ann Eva (named for her mother), Elbert, Margaret, Mary, Willie Jay, and Guy Evan remained in the house at 346 10th Street in Oshkosh. Also living in the home was oldest daughter Allie, known to her family as Dot, with her new husband and infant daughter. Family lore indicates that Allie took over a lot of the mothering duties with the death of her own mother, perhaps explaining why she and her husband, August Gumz, remained in the Blake family home after their marriage and the birth of their daughter, Ollie.
But three-year-old Lester was not found in the home of John Arza Blake when the census taker came knocking that June of 1900. Just down the street at 161 10th Street, Lester lived in the home of his (maternal) McCammond grandparents, Charles and Mary Ann, along with his aunt, Nellie McCammond. With Charles and Mary Ann both in their seventies and Charles beginning to suffer the paralysis that would eventually kill him, it is likely that the majority of care for young Lester was provided by Nellie.
Nellie McCammond remains something of a woman of mystery. The youngest of the six children of Charles and Mary Ann McCammond, she was sixteen years the junior of her sister, Ann Eva McCammond Blake. While no record has been found, Nellie apparently married a Fred Stevenson and gave birth to a son, Arthur, who never took his father’s last name and lived his entire life as Arthur McCammond. At the time of the 1900 census, fourteen-year-old Arthur was not living with his mother, which could perhaps explain how she was able to devote herself to her young nephew, three-year-old Lester, as well as caring for her aged and infirm parents.
John Arza Blake and his children by Ann Eva McCammond
As a young boy, Lester found himself surrounded by his large and close-knit family. As a very young toddler, he would have seen his oldest brother, James Orva, join Company F of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, just in time to see military action in Puerto Rico as part of the Spanish-American War. At roughly the same time, older brother James Harvey traveled to the timberlands of northern Wisconsin to work as a lumberjack, perilous work then as now. It is not surprising that, when he reached his teens, Lester would strike out for adventure, just as his brothers had done.
By 1905, Lester had returned to his father’s home, now including just his two older sisters, Margaret and Mary, and two older brothers, Willie Jay and Guy. In 1907, Lester’s father, John Arza, introduced a new member into the family, marrying Ida Belle Gallagher, a thirty-year-old spinster schoolteacher from nearby Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1910, John Arza and Ida Belle would welcome their only child, daughter Emily May.
One of John Arza’s most sincere wishes was that each of his children would receive a good education. In spite of this emphasis on learning, none of his offspring with Ann Eva McCammond would graduate high school (his daughter with Ida Belle Gallagher, Emily May, would graduate from high school just weeks after John Arza’s death). One by one, each of John Arza’s sons would leave Oshkosh, beginning with his eldest, James Orva, who, by 1910, was living in the community of Seaside, Oregon.
In January of 1913, Lester Blake turned sixteen, and the charms of Oshkosh began to wear thin. In March, he served as a pallbearer for his one remaining grandparent, his paternal grandmother Hannah Blake. With the end of the school year in June, Lester could wait no longer. Boarding a westbound train, he left Oshkosh to begin his adult life in Seaside, Oregon, with his older brother, John Orva.
In Seaside, Lester lived with John Orva as well as with John’s wife, Katie, his son, Edwin, and his daughters, Bernice, Jessie, and Margurite. John Orva worked as an “expressman” (teamster) while Katie tended the children who were all under the age of ten years. It is unclear just what employment Lester may have found in Seaside, but within just a month or two of his arrival, he had made friends in his new community and had taken up a new sport—the hunting of sea lions.
Sea lions still sunbathe on Oregon's coast
Sea-lion hunting served not only as a sport for gamesmen in early twentieth-century Oregon but also as a lucrative trade. As early as 1888, sea lions and other pinnipeds were characterized as “perhaps the greatest” mortal enemies of salmon. With salmon fishing an important component of the coastal economy, it is no surprise that by the first years of the twentieth century bounties were offered by the state government for sea lions and seals. In 1909 alone, the state of Oregon paid a total of $945.47 for the carcasses of upwards of 900 sea lions and seals. A bounty system on pinnipeds would remain in effect in Oregon until the 1950s.
Early on the morning of August 6, 1913, Lester and two of his friends headed toward the shoreline to hunt. The three young men separated, each left to his own devices to pursue his prey. Lester carried a 44-60 Winchester rifle, a gun powerful enough to bring down a large, strong sea lion. According to the information given to his father, while alone, Lester “was forced to reach for it [his gun] on a bank of rocks.” With the muzzle pointed toward his chest, the gun fired.
Teddy Roosevelt with a rifle similar to that carried by young Lester Blake
Lester fell, mortally wounded, with the tide slowly coming toward him. His two companions found him, bloody and unconscious with the water quite near, and quickly carried him up the shore. He regained consciousness just long enough to thank his friends for moving him “where the water could not get me,” before expiring of internal hemorrhages caused by a punctured lung. According to published reports, the bullet had struck Lester in the shoulder, then passed downward through his lung toward the spine.
A telegram was immediately sent to John Arza Blake in Oshkosh, telling him of his son’s death. At noon on August 7, John Arza boarded a westbound train with his son, James Harvey, and headed toward Oregon. The initial telegram received by John Arza gave only the sparest of details, and for a time there was speculation that Lester had purposefully turned the gun on himself. While Lester had never given any sign of suicidal tendencies, without a definitive explanation as to his son’s sudden death, the long journey across the country must have been agonizing for John Arza. Back in Oshkosh, Lester’s sisters, Allie and Ann Eva waited with grieving hearts, as did Margaret living in Iowa, Mary living in Michigan, Willie, Guy, and Elbert all living in Canada, and Franklin at his home in North Dakota.
The decision was made by John Arza to bury Lester in Seaside rather than to bring his body back to Oshkosh. He was laid to rest at the Evergreen Cemetery in Seaside, where, sadly, he would soon be joined by his brother John Orva’s young daughter, Bernice, when she was just eight years old, and John Orva's son, Lawrence, when he was not even one year old.
Two years after Lester’s death, in August of 1915, his oldest sister, Allie, was expecting her ninth child. After eight girls, she and her husband, August Gumz, hoped for a son. When that son was born on August 19, two years and thirteen days after the death of Lester, Allie and August named him James Donovan, this little son carrying the same middle name as his uncle who had died so tragically and so young.
Young Lester had been born in the war-hungry days of “Cuba Libre” and the Spanish-American War. When he died, the nations of Europe found themselves in an escalating cycle of diplomat disputes and minor skirmishes that would culminate in 1914 with the beginnings of World War I. Had he lived, young Lester may have felt that same call to service that his brother, John Orva, had felt in 1898. As things turned out, it would be his brother, Guy Evan, then the youngest of the remaining Blake brothers, who would follow in the family tradition of military service. But that’s another story….
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