Odd, Old News: Wee Willie’s Wayward Wandering Ways
Crop of a 1910 image from the Department of Commerce and Labor. Children’s Bureau.
Nuggets of old news served up once a week by David Heller, one of our local historians.
Perhaps the most illustrious child runaway in Humboldt County history, eight or ten year old Willie Herman showed a fearless propensity for traveling “freely” and playing upon the sympathy of strangers.
Humboldt Times, Thursday, July 21, 1898
MOVED A COP BY A FAIRY TALE
Now Chasing a Mythical Father in San Francisco
Willie Herman’s Adventures
A Ten Year Old Boy Gains Sympathy & Shelter by Relating a Story of a Lost ParentFrom inquiry at the end of the line, it would appear that the San Francisco policeman who was moved by ten year old Willie Herman’s sad face & plausible story of a lost parent, has been nicely fooled. According to Willie, he had left Eureka for San Francisco to join his father who was working in a lumber yard. The letter of his sire he had lost, he said, & consequently was at sea in the big town. The policeman cared for his wants & began a search for the parent. The facts of the case do not agree with Willie’s tale. His father is in Eureka where he left him, & his appearance in San Francisco can be satisfactorily explained at the Sheriff’s office. Here this ten year old rover is well known, having been wanted at different times. It was in fact his mania for using other people’s horses without their knowledge or consent that eventually took Willie out of the county.
While prowling around Blocksburg in June, sometime after he had quit the parental roof, Willie took a fancy to Mr. Roger’s mare which he rode as far as Fortuna, followed all the way by a young colt. Shelter Cove was the next place he indulged his liking. There he appropriated the horse of John Ray & reached Bear Harbor, Mendocino county, before being overtaken.
It was Willie’s youth & innocent manner that pleaded for him here. A warrant was not sworn out & the young transgressor was allowed to continue on his way,
A new danger, however, threatened Willie. It was the House of Correction at Ione. His fear of this punishment caused him to proceed down the coast until he reached San Francisco where a well told fairy story procured for him such comforts as the city price affords while the officers are making their vain search for the father.
Willie’s story-telling gift enabled him to ‘hitch’ a ride with the sailing vessel Chilkat…
The Daily Humboldt Standard, July 25, 1898
Willie Herman, the ten-year-old runaway who was picked up by the police in San Francisco recently, was brought back on the Chilkat yesterday and turned over to Sheriff Brown who will restore him to his father.Willie ran away from his home in this city a month ago and by devious ways, sometimes walking, sometimes riding stolen horses, traveled overland to San Francisco where when found by the police he told a fairy tale about having come to seek his father who worked in the lumber yard there. Evidently the police turned him loose and finding it rather hard picking he concluded to return to his home here. At any rate Willie put in appearance at Chilkat’s wharf when she was ready to sail Friday and told another of his fairy stories. He is quite a romancer for one so young and is ever ready with a story of a cruel parent and his deserted self as the central figures. To Agent Doe of the Chilkat he told a heartrending tale of an unnatural father who had brought him San Francisco and deserted him there to return to a cruel step-mother in Eureka who had induced the father to get rid of him as she had children of her own. This story together with his generally woe begone and neglected appearance had its effect on the kind hearted agent and Willie was given a passage to Eureka.
On the way up the little fellow told his “cruel parent” story over and over with little variation and gained the sympathy of all onboard, particularly Capt. Anderson who was working up to such a pitch of indignation over it that it would not have been healthy for the father of the youthful Ananias to have come aboard to claim his offspring. He would be safe enough now, however, for the Captain has since learned that the waif’s story was made out of the whole cloth, and that the cruel parent and the designing step-mother are myths.
The fact of the matter is that the boy has a good home but lacks the care of a mother. The mother died some years ago and since then, and older sister, who is yet in her teens, endeavored to take her place and care for him and his little brother, the father’s occupation, that of a woodsman, making it necessary for him to be away from home for long periods.
Willie hitched his second free ship ride…
The Daily Humboldt Standard November 25, 1898
Eight year-old Willie Herman whose numerous runaway escapades have been recounted in the daily paper here is consistent like the legendary cat. He always comes back. On a recent trip of the steamer Chilkat his father took him to San Francisco and after placing him in an orphanage returned on the steamer North Fork. But Willie’s penchant for running away had not been cured for scarcely had the North Fork pulled out from her wharf when Willie put in an appearance at the Pomona’s wharf and tried to “work” Captain Shea for a passage home, and had he succeeded he would have beaten his father by several hours. The Captain, however, had heard of Willie and his romantic story and gave him “the marble heart”. Un(sic)daunted by his failure Willie succeeded in enlisting the sympathies of a good natured captain of a sailing vessel bound for this port and arrived her in time to eat his Thanksgiving turkey while seated in the ‘vacant chair’ at his own fireside.
On April 4th, 1899 the Chilkat capsized and was wrecked by waves while leaving the Humboldt Bay and crossing the Humboldt bar at low ebb. Captain Anderson and nine others lost their lives, the worst maritime loss of life caused by the treacherous Humboldt bar.
We don’t know what happened to Willie Herman.
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Hmm… In July, Willie was ten. By November, he was eight. Willie Herman is a very, very remarkable child indeed.
Interesting story, but I especially liked the unique style of prose and storytelling these journalists used back in the day.
You mean stories told with a sense of humor that is no longer tolerated? I can see the comments if the internet had been available at that time:
User- Outraged Mother : The child is obviously abused. Why else would he run away? His parents (didn’t bother to read article carefully) should be investigated.
User- Orange Trump: Trump is responsible for cutting funding to schools, which is where Willie should be instead of becoming more ignorant future conservatives.
User- Defiant Grower: If HCSO would spend more time doing their job instead of raiding mom and pop grows, they would have caught the kid before he stole a horse.
User- Government Conspiracies Abound: The military has taken over The Chilcat and is capturing children to be used to as spies.
Response from User- I’m Right, You’re Wrong: I’m right, you’re a liar. (Link)
User- Dogs Are Great: When will Willie be available to adopt?
Response from User- You’re Stupid: Read the story (edit)
User- Marijuana Manny: Way to go, Willie.
No Conservatives making silly statements?
It was an age of conservatives. Wouldn’t surprise me if the author of the articles (likely the publisher too?) were delightfully conservative, full of optimism and enterprise.
“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Looking back on Mr. Buckley’s quote, I think it’s somewhat dated. Liberals don’t claim they want to hear other views anymore. But if one comes to their notice, they’re still offended.
I was referring to your “I can see the comments if the internet had been available at that time:”
You seem to be offended if someone notices something bad a conservative does but doesn’t at least give equal time to something bad a liberal does so I was surprised (not really) to note that though you thought of attacking conservatives, you hadn’t thought of anything silly a conservative could say.
Also, I usually, at your suggestion, delete references to Orange Trump but since you were making a point, I left it.
So no outraged mothers, government conspiracists, dog lovers, growers, etc could be conservative? What do you perceive makes a conservative? I think you must define a conservative only as objecting to what liberals say without understanding exactly what the objection is. You think a conservative objects to a well fed, healthy,well educated humanity when what they object to is liberals wanting to make them slaves in order to feed, treat or educate them.
Some more quotes from one of the most famous conservatives in the last 100 years:
“What yells out at the US public . . . is the incandescent hypocrisy of so many people who, in the name of free speech, persecute its practitioners if their opinions are conservative.”
“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”
“The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.”
But the ones that align with my own beliefs most closely is:
“Conservatism is the politics of reality.”
“All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.”
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
“There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.”
And my favorite definition of conservative includes “I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me.”
William F. Buckley, Jr.
My favorite Buckley quote goes something like “I descry the vulgarization of America” … and that was before blogs and the tabloidization of the MSM had metastasized!
I enjoyed your humorous what if there was an internet… post Guest.
My favorite Buckley quote goes something like “I descry the vulgarization of America” … and that was before blogs and the tabloidization of the MSM had metastasized!
I enjoyed your humorous what if there was an internet comment, Guest.
Apparently the edit function doesn’t work from a 16.8kbs landline connection, please pardon my reduncancy.
Editing doesn’t work from a cell connection either. But thanks for your comment. You could have repeated much more than twice IMHO. I enjoyed the article.
Guest, you said “Orange Trump: Trump is responsible for cutting funding to schools, which is where Willie should be instead of becoming more ignorant future conservatives.”
Definitely a dig at liberal commenters (and a deserved one.)
But there is no equal and balancing dig at conservative commenters (Yes, any of the non partisan could be conservative but the one I quoted was definitely liberal.)
I’m sure you would consider “User- Government Conspiracies Abound” a conservative. a word you used in similar cases. I’ll add another William Buckly quote at this point -“I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”
What I did was take a typical round of comments here as the basis for my fictional 1890’s internet comments. I thought someone would come back with why didn’t you lampoon yourself. Was going to respond in case that there wasn’t room. (Yes that would be funny too.)
I know that I complain about the lack of balance in reporting but even if you were right about my bias, which you weren’t, there is no obligation for a private commenter to publish without bias. There should be such a requirement in a media presenting news to the public.
There isn’t a requirement for you to be without bias. Just a sense of amusement on my part that you aren’t when you push me so hard in my COMMENT section to be unbiased–I think of the comment section as where I get a chance to state my opinion.
Also, dang you think conservatives have government conspiracies wrapped up? Some of my liberal friends have a list a mile long.
You would not feel alarm bells going off if a police officer makes a racially derogatory comment on face book? Well that’s what happens when a reporter does the same outside of an editorial page. To those having a different opinion, it raises question about the biased nature when they act professionally but insist without bias. For those who agree with them, it emboldened them to go farther in their own biases.
If you didn’t own the news site it would not be an issue. But you do and it is.
You are always welcome to tell me how awful I am. I delete only the really bad ones where people threaten me. You frequently tell me that I am biased. I hear you and chose to agree or not, make changes or not. The difference between most other media and me is that I tell you what I believe in the comment section. Then you can look at the piece I wrote and decide whether I might have drifted from neutral. (And my articles are sweated over to be as neutral as I know how to be) All the other media voices have opinions/judgments also, you just don’t have a baseline to decide if and how they’ve drifted in their articles because they hide it from you.
I like to be as honest as I can (sometimes I have other people’s secrets so can’t be totally) and let people judge from there.
And, if I make a racially derogatory statement in the comment section, I hope I get feedback and learn to be better.
Hey, Guest, Let’s take a different view. “Conservative” connotes preservation or retaining the old way. “Liberal” connotes change or something new. Neither inclination is inherently superior to the other. As Roger Rodoni once suggested, quoting as best I can: “ The truth is not always exactly in the middle of opposing views; the truth is where you find it.”
Now let’s take a brief look at reality. Slavery was the old, conservative way, centuries old. The liberal, new view was that slavery was a crime against humanity and an affront to the Abrahamic Deity. Score one for the liberals.
Torturing and killing people whose religious beliefs are not your own was the traditional way since at least Roman rule where Christ and his acolytes were crucified, burned, and fed to beasts. When the Christians assumed power, they in turn attacked Jews, Muslims, pagans whose religious views were not their own. For centuries, the Pope and later the Protestants persecuted natives around the world to force them into Christianity until liberals ended it, joined by the liberal Founders of the United States who codified religious freedom as an American Standard. Score a big one for liberalism.
We could go on and on with this. Virtually every advancement of civilization has liberal roots. Child labor laws, safe workplace, living or even, gasp, generous wage, clean food, safe water AND every single voting woman and female elective office-holder can thank LIBERALS. It was Conservatives, many waving Bibles, mostly men, who stood in your way. Go ahead and vote for Republicans if you must, but it was a LIBERAL victory that lets you vote for conservatives.
BTW, you conservatives have one hell of a giant nerve talking about intolerance of opposing opinions with your braying jack-ass of a President, who shames and demeans our United States, my America, every single day. Just because somebody disagrees with you does not mean they are impeding your free speech. We are the Leader of the Free World, get used to it. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Concerning William F. Buckley, jr., his conservative views were allegedly largely influenced by his Southern Belle mother whose conservative views on racial justice for black people were well known. See . . . . racist policies were the old conservative way, but . . . oh yeah, we covered that. Anything from Buckley on racism? love to read it!
President Trump is an ignoramus who attacked and criticized American institutions through the whole campaign. Even now, he chooses to believe Putin while insulting and demeaning our intelligence services. Yet he vilifies four female U.S. Representatives for offering criticism and complaints which they were hired to do in elective office. Free speech is guaranteed to all citizens anyway.
Oh, I forgot, dumping on people who are “different” is the old, asinine, conservative way. I was hoping for maybe The American Way. My bad. I’d rather be an American rather than a Republican.
To some extent you are right that conservatives do not like government to force change, whether it is good change or bad change, whereas liberals want the government to force change, whether it is good change or bad change. Where liberal blinders reach extremely foolish arrogance is in not noticing that much good exists in what people have developed themselves without using the law to force others and the touted liberal action only come into play when this natural behavior goes astray. In other words, child labor laws become possible only because people had developed the industrial revolution without passing laws that took children out of the household to work and so made them visible to abuse in factories and sweat shops. Before child labor was a matter of parents making children useful to the family or sending them out to develop a trade. The change to manufacturing instead of agriculture created the wealth in the first place that allowed the current ideal of a non laboring child possible and that change had not a whiff of liberal arrogance in it. It was a progress created by humanity, those innately conservative adventurers, not liberals. I suppose if the same current liberals had power then, they would have not seen the good in capitalism and lumbered it with so much legal baggage that we would all be planting oats by hand and praying for rain for survival to this day.
Women’s sufferage fed at the same trough too. As did labor rights, universal education, workers comp, civil rights movements, etc. All made possible because there were natural advances created by humanity not impeded by excess of liberal values. Once a person could become wealthy through their own efforts and protected by a competent police force, then all people could demand equal access to the wealth and protection of these institutions created. The conservative values of freedom of the individual to make their on way created a world where liberals could find issues to take the founders to task. That conservatives tend to want to hang on to, even sometimes past its time (Luddites-conservative or liberal?), to the “old” ways. They are the very ways that created the success that liberals demand access to. Even slave emancipation was not the thing you think it was as most of the abolitioists were northerners acting on their Christian ethics. Except of couse for those unfortunate to have actually been slaves.
Now let’s talk about evil liberalism and the wreaks it’s created. Communism is of course the largest recent disaster of liberals gone wild. The millions who died at the hands of liberals regulating change are well known. The destruction of economies, starvation and illnesses created by men who loved to force people to be better by forcing people to conform to some impossible liberal ideal. That is well known but there are many liberal failures along the way that are smaller but just as destructive from Peasant’s Rebellion in England in 1380s, to shipping orphans out west from New York City by those reformers known as Charles Loring Brace Children’s Aid Society, the utopian societies such as New Harmony Community that ended under the weight of its liberal values. I suppose even the current drug culture misery is due in part to the liberal values of the Hippie youth movements.
How you came to such a deep misunderstanding of history comes from the blind assumption that only liberal regulation creates good because it feels good. You simply define liberals as the only good based on not seeing the good people created for themselves by not being burdened by liberal regulations throughout history and ignoring the evil of liberal tyranny thoughout history. Lord save us from the excesses of good intentions.
“We don’t know what happened to Willie Herman.”
I would start by checking prison records. Considering he was a lying, stealing, manipulator at eight years old prison was very likely his final destination.
Check Washington D.C.
I think he’s alive and doin just fine.
In fact he comments on this site frequently 🐸😊🍭🌭🎪🤩
The most interesting short article I’ve read in a while. That journey at the time would be nothing short of epic for a unsupervised child. And wait, we can’t make fun of the Orange man, when did that happen?
You can make fun of him. However, you can’t make fun of his color because I don’t allow people to make fun of personal characteristics that one can’t change–so tattoos okay to mock, crossed-eyes not okay to sneer at—and President Trump’s orange appears to be intrinsic to him.
🕯🌳👍🏽On your beliefs.
You don’t thinks it’s a side effect of his spray on personality?
The orange color is a fake suntan. It’s what happens when layer after layer of sunless tanning cream is applied in order to cover up an undesired physical feature. It’s vanity to the extreme.
I thought his color was as intrinsic as his hair? A daily choice. Wait, are we suggesting that’s his natural skin color?
I ruled (possibly with a slight bit of tongue in cheek) that no one sane would choose to be an odd color like orange so therefor Trump’s coloring must be natural or at least so intrinsic to his self as to make it similar to mocking Obama’s coloring which of course isn’t allowed.
Ok, ok, ok, tryin very hard to think of a rebuttal…. but damn it that’s a good point.i don’t believe I can ever put so much mental effort into something as I just have on this issue and I am still perplexed.
A very capable eight/ten year old, just imagine a local Eureka child of that age today being able to get from Eureka to San Francisco on their own.
My father was capable of many things at ten years old, but stricter enforcement of child labor laws, and my father not wishing for me to follow his footsteps down that particular path, lead me to have a fun and safe childhood.
That photo is really exceptional. I keep going back to look at it. I’m sure it’s staged, but it’s still awesome. Perfect light & expression.
That’s not a child as we see them today- that’s a little man. Makes me want to examine children’s photos from the 1910’s and later. At some point in time people’s expectations of childhood changed. I would guess it was after 1910 judging by that photo.
To state the obvious, children had to grow up faster 100 years ago. Whilst frowning at his playing upon the good hearts of his audiences and rescuers, I also thought that he was remarkably confident and self-reliant to make those journeys alone at either of his reported ages.
Correction: Despite what one newspaper account reported the wreck of the Chilkat was not the worst loss of life from a shipwreck on the Humboldt bar —Merrimac ( United States), 22 February 1863. The tug flipped over while trying to cross the bar with loss of all on board, estimated to be 18. She was refloated and repaired.[3]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_of_Humboldt_County,_California