Thomas Lovewell’s daughter Julaney was only two years old when her father left Iowa in the spring of 1859 to join the gold rush to Pikes Peak. Father and daughter would have no contact with each other for the next thirty-three years.
Quickly discovering that tales of gold nuggets littering the stream beds near Denver had been vastly overblown, Thomas pushed farther west, reaching northern California in November. Catching up to his younger brothers Solomon and Alfred, he spent most of 1860 working mining claims in Nevada Territory, and may have been foolish enough to stagger about for a few weeks in Death Valley. When the nation went to war Thomas and Alfred enlisted in the 3rd California Infantry.
By the time the absentee husband and father finally hit the trail back to Iowa in 1865, his wife Nancy had decided to move on, taking the couple’s daughter Julaney with her. Pairing up for a time with a neighbor named Aaron Kennedy, Nancy moved to Carroll County, Missouri, where another daughter, Cora Alice, was born c. 1869. When the girl was old enough to inquire about her father, she was told that the late Mr. Kennedy had been killed in a runaway accident.
In 1871 fourteen-year-old Julaney Lovewell married a young Irish immigrant named Edward McCaul. Julaney’s mother was working as a domestic a year later when she met Michael Turnbull, an English widower with two teenage children at home. When she became Mrs. Turnbull, Nancy shed the last vestige of her previous identity, preferring to be known thereafter by her middle name, Mariah. Julaney’s apparent preference for being known as Julia may not have been entirely her own idea.
By 1875 the Turnbulls had moved to Ridgeway, Kansas, but soon relocated to the burgeoning town of Carbondale, where Michael labored in the local coal mines before fracturing his leg. After the accident neighbors took up a collection to equip him with a lunch wagon, allowing him to support his family by peddling sandwiches and baked goods along Main Street. The bill of fare may have included a few flasks of liquid refreshment. There were sound reasons why the press often referred to Turnbull as “jolly Uncle Mikey.”
When the McCauls joined the Turnbulls in Carbondale, the families opened adjacent businesses, a restaurant and billiards parlor for the McCauls and a bakery and confectionery shop operated by the Turnbulls. Judging from the legal problems that would plague the partners in coming years, their profit margins may have depended on steady sales of alcohol, a revenue stream which was about to tap out.
In 1879 Michael Turnbull’s seventeen-year-old daughter Susan became engaged to John W. Robinson, a suitor who listed his age on the marriage license as twenty-four, although census data reveals him to have been at least thirty at the time. Six months after the wedding, Robinson was driving locomotives for the Union Pacific in North Platte, Nebraska, where his older brother James was a railway conductor.
Susan would join her husband in Nebraska in time for their first child, Marie, to be born there in 1881. It was after the birth of Marie’s sister Alice in 1883 that the Robinson marriage seemed to hit a snag.
1883 was also the year Carbondale authorities managed to run Edward McCaul out of town by peppering him with indictments for selling alcoholic spirits in Kansas, which had become the nation’s first dry state in 1881. Although friendly juries balked at convicting McCaul, recurring legal bills led the practical young man to seek new opportunities in the wide-open spaces of Washington Territory.
Julaney and their children would also make the journey to the Northwest, once markers could be called in, property sold, and outstanding debts paid. Even then, the family reunion would be temporary.
Julaney soon brought the children back to Carbondale, minus her eldest boy, Edward, Jr., who remained in the Northwest with his father. Late in life, Edward McCaul, Jr., would recall working on riverboats to help support his family. Apparently he was about seven or eight when he was introduced to the life of a roustabout.
No longer having a house of their own in Carbondale, the returning McCauls moved in with Julaney’s mother and stepfather, the Turnbulls. The place quickly started filling up.
By 1885 the former Susan Turnbull had also come home, apparently ready to dismiss her marriage to John Robinson as nothing more than a bad dream, even while living in the same house with her former husband and their two children.
In that year’s census, not only is Susan listed with her father and stepmother, but she has discarded her married name and is recorded as Susan Turnbull, who is checked off as being a single woman. “Julia” McCaul is listed next, along with three of her McCaul children, followed by John Robinson and his two little girls, Marie and Alice. The grouping of names in the 1885 census becomes more significant when Julaney McCaul gives birth to John Robinson’s daughter Lilly on a riverboat near Portland in January 1887.
Back in Kansas, by 1887 the Turnbull family had moved ten miles north to the capital city of Topeka, a city with twenty times the population of Carbondale, and, with any luck, an abundance of thirsty customers willing to flout the law.
Late in the year the Topeka City Council considered a petition “allowing Michael Turnbull to sell tobacco, cigars, cider, etc., at the corner of Second and Quincy streets without the payment of the city license tax… It seems that Mr. Turnbull has a wife, daughter and three children to support and can do so comfortably if relieved of the burden of a heavy tax.”
While Michael Turnbull’s petition for tax relief ultimately failed, it does offer clues about the makeup of the Turnbull household in Topeka at that moment.
Given the number of various dependents, the group must have included twenty-five-year-old Susan, once more caring for her two Robinson girls, with the help of Cora Alice, Mariah Turnbull’s daughter from her informal alliance with Aaron Kennedy back when she was still officially Nancy Lovewell. In the Carbondale census two years earlier, Cora Alice had lived with one of the family’s neighbors, Ella Moon, a young widow listed in the census as a laborer, supporting her three small boys.
In March 1888 Mariah Turnbull died suddenly of an inflamed bowel. The following year her bereaved husband was arrested twice for selling alcohol at his little place on Quincy Street near the Kaw River. Unable to pay his fines Michael Turnbull would serve a hundred days in jail, despite the tearful jailhouse pleas of his daughter Susan.
By 1889 the Robinson girls must have been handed off to Julaney for the final time. It’s only a guess, but Cora Alice, now almost twenty, may have chaperoned Marie and Alice Robinson on a rail journey to the Northwest or to St. Louis, wherever the McCauls and John Robinson had roosted just then.
In 1891 Susan Turnbull, unencumbered by family and probably scratching out a living by cleaning houses, made a fortunate match in Topeka with Jesse Morton Underwood, a widower with a Civil War pension and two young girls at home. Jesse, who was about forty-five, had been a farmer and part-time deputy sheriff when deteriorating eyesight forced him to find work as a day laborer in the city.
It seems likely that Susan had been hired to keep house and care for the little Underwood girls before swapping employment for matrimony. Since the late Mrs. Underwood had also been named Susan, her replacement would be called Josie, which was apparently her middle name. In short order, Josie Underwood added two more girls to the Underwood family, Edith and Margaret, before presenting Jesse with his only sons that survived infancy, Grant and Harry, born in 1895 and 1900.
(For much more about their adventures in Topeka see Happy Birthday, Susie!)
The former Susan Robinson’s girls Marie and Alice account for two of the six children mentioned by Julaney McCaul when she would finally pen a desperate letter to the stationmaster of Lovewell Depot, pleading for information about her long-lost father. Rounding out the half-dozen dependents in her care at that moment were Lilly, Julaney’s own daughter with John Robinson, plus three of her four children with Edward McCaul: Edward Jr., William, and Alice.
We believe that in 1893 Julaney and the six children in her care were living near St. Louis, while the man who was technically still her husband, Edward McCaul, languished in a railroad hospital following a workplace accident.
The economy had crashed early in the year, and with a full-fledged depression settling over the nation, there was a frantic race to finish the new St. Louis Depot before funding dried up. Perhaps it was the promise of a good job in a land of dwindling possibilities that brought the family to St. Louis, minus one of their boys.
This time it was young Fredrick Francis McCaul, who stayed behind in Washington State, whittling off a piece of the McCaul surname to live out his days as Fred Caul.
The complicated tale of how Julaney Lovewell McCaul finally managed to learn her father’s whereabouts, just in time for him to rescue her family from grinding poverty, really needs its own page. We’ll tackle it next time.