Grandma's Stories

When we were young, of course, we didn’t know him by any other name; he was our grandfather, after all.  But his real name was Charles Francis Wiggs, and he immigrated to the U.S. in 1902 aboard the S.S. Philadelphia.  A brother, Ernest, and sister, Florence, traveled on to California to their father, who had left England before them.  Another sister, Ada Elizabeth, stayed in England but eventually left for Australia about 1912.

Papa stayed in Chicago and became a bookkeeper for Wm. Cooper & Nephews.  From there, he went to Billings, Montana in 1908, and in 1910, opened an office for the Chicago Flexible Shaft Co. and Wm. Cooper & Nephews combined.

This was why he started traveling throughout the West on a stagecoach; he was selling sheep-shearing equipment, and traveled to the huge farms and ranches in Wyoming and Montana.   

I have some of his recorded comments about those years, and will post them on this site soon.  But I remember him saying that the winters would get so cold that the small flask of whiskey he carried with him couldn’t even begin to touch the chill.  I have that flask, sitting on a bookcase that I inherited from him some years ago that now graces my bedroom at home.  It’s a small flask; I would be surprised if it held even a pint of whiskey.  But knowing Montana winters after all the years I lived there, I can imagine that even a little whiskey might have been a small spark.

When I first moved to Montana from Oregon in 1984, the first house I lived in was at the tip of the Bitterroot Valley just off Carleton Creek Road in the small town of Florence, and had been an old stage coach stop.  Because I knew Papa had often travled up and down the Bitterroot, I liked to think that perhaps he had stayed there once or twice – or at least stopped in.

But more likely, according to his own records, he stayed at the Daly Mansion down in Hamilton.  The Daly Mansion was build by Marcus Daly, one of Montana’s “copper kings,” and was known far and wide for its elegance and for the race horses born and bred there.  I’ve never known why Papa was able to stay there on his travels, but he said that the Daly Mansion and the hotel run in Cody, Wyoming, by the sister of Buffalo Bill Cody, were the only two decent places to stay in the territory - at least your clothes would dry overnight if you’d been out in the weather.  I’ve wondered if the Daly Mansion accepted weary travelers in the manner of some of the old southern plantations; certainly the Bitterroot was not populated then as it is now.

In any event, before Mom died, she visited Montana a couple of times, and on one of those trips, I took her through the Daly Mansion.  At the thought of being in the same rooms where her father might have walked, she had tears in her eyes.  I’ve often thought he would recognize those beautiful Bitterroot Mountains today – they can’t have changed.