Genealogist Newsletter- October 18, 2025

18 Oct Genealogist Newsletter- October 18, 2025

GENEALOGIST- THE MORMON ASSASSIN

My niece’s husband’s ancestor, William Adams “Wild Bill” Hickman (1815 – 1883), married his first wife, Bernetta Burchartt, in 1832, at 17. While living in Missouri, Hickman encountered members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traveling from Kirtland, Ohio, to their new gathering place in Clay County, Missouri, and ultimately agreed to be baptized into the religion in 1838.

Upon the killing of Joseph Smith in 1844, he and many other Mormons followed Brigham Young westward into Mexican territory. During this period, Hickman began to practice polygamy under the instruction of Brigham Young, marrying Sarah Elizabeth Luce as his second wife in 1846.

In the spring of 1848, Hickman moved to an encampment in Iowa called Council Bluffs, where he performed what he would later call “my first act of violence under the rule of Brigham Young” in tracking down and killing a Native American who had threatened the prophet. The LDS families traveled westward, where he claimed to have killed Native Americans, whom they had happened across before finally arriving in Salt Lake City in 1849, where he started a homestead ten miles south of the city proper.

Early the following year, in 1850, tensions in Utah Valley between Mormon colonists and the natives had been increasing. Ultimately, the murder of a native man led to them taking Mormon cattle as an informal weregild (blood money). In response to this insult, the Mormon militia was raised, and Hickman joined them in what would come to be known as the Provo River Massacre. During the course of violence, Hickman records killing the chief of the band, Old Elk, whose head he removed with his Bowie Knife, and which he brought back to Fort Utah and hung from the walls. The massacre ultimately killed around 50 men, and the surviving women and children were taken and sold as slaves to church members.

In 1852, the Mormon-controlled Utah legislature passed a law granting Mormons the preferred right to operate ferries over the Green River, thereby increasing tensions with the Mountain Men, who were associated with Fort Bridger and had been running the ferries over the river. Rumors began swirling that Jim Bridger was arming Native groups in the area, and affidavits were drawn up to that effect. Hickman was sent along with a posse of 150 Mormon militia who killed a couple of the mountain men and stole several hundred head of stock and whiskey they found at the fort, although Jim Bridger himself was not there.

In April 1854, fearing retribution by the mountain men or allied Native bands, Hickman was asked by Young to go to Green River and establish a ferry under church ownership. Hickman found the area to be overrun by ferries, along with a growing uneasiness between Mormon ferrymen and mountain men. Instead, Hickman established a prosperous trading post at Pacific Springs near South Pass, 26 miles east of Green River. Hickman was appointed sheriff and county prosecuting attorney, assessor, and collector by Judge Appleby in 1854 at Fort Supply, twelve miles south of Fort Bridger. In August 1854, Hickman was elected to the Utah Territorial Legislature for the area of Green River. Genealogist.

Hickman was involved in the Aiken massacre of five travelers in 1857 when he killed Horace Bucklin under direct orders from Young. Hickman was an important figure in the Utah War. He torched Fort Bridger and numerous supply trains of the Federal Army.

Hickman, according to his autobiography, first began to break with Brigham Young during the latter’s handling of the Morrisite War in 1863, claiming to put his name alongside those of many Utah non-Mormons to an ultimately successful petition to have the surviving prisoners of the minor sect released by a pardon from the (non-Brighamite) territorial governor. This act of minor resistance was followed by a direct confrontation with Brigham Young later in that year, when Hickman claimed that Brigham Young ordered him to murder U.S. Army General Patrick Edward Connor, for whom Hickman had been acting as a scout.

Hickman later said he had refused the order, saying, “It shan’t be done; I will see to that myself”. Hickman’s work as a scout for the hated U.S. Army may have been what ultimately turned Brigham Young and his former co-religionists against him. Following a series of legal complaints by the local Probate Court, which was a church-run alternative legal system particular to the Utah Territory, he spent time in jail, upon release finding out that much of his property had been expropriated by his neighbors at the behest of their local bishop and, as he was a practicing polygamist, his many wives and children encouraged to leave him”.

With armed men hounding his movements and his family dissolving, Hickman resolved to leave Utah in fear for his life. He spent the next several years prospecting for gold in California and Nevada. In 1868, while Hickman was still in California, his Bishop of Taylorsville, Utah, excommunicated him from the LDS Church, and with his plural marriages no longer being in force, ultimately, nine of his ten wives would leave him.

Around September 1871, the now estranged Hickman confessed to murdering Richard Yates and stated it was at the request of Brigham Young. This was under interrogation by Deputy Marshal H. Gilson, who was attempting to make a case against Brigham Young for ordering murders across the territory. He was held at Fort Douglas and guarded by the military for his safety.

He gave testimony to a Grand Jury about crimes he had committed and seen committed under the instruction of Brigham Young. While at Fort Douglas, he wrote his autobiography, which was later given to J. H. Beadle, who performed some basic fact-checking and ultimately published it under the title Brigham’s Destroying Angel. Some say his deeds were exaggerated and the book was published by anti-Mormon interests.

Nothing ever became of the case against Young, who died in 1877. Hickman, who had struck a deal with federal law enforcement to testify against Young if he were ever to be brought to trial, was never convicted of the crimes to which he confessed. He ultimately left Utah, dying in Landers, Wyoming, in August 1883.

Hickman had ten wives. He married his first wife, Bernetta Burchartt (1832); his second wife, Sarah Elizabeth Luce (1846); his third wife, Minerva Emma Wade (1849); his fourth wife, Sarah Basford Meacham (1850); his fifth wife, Hannah Diantha Horr (1853); his sixth wife was recorded only as an “Indian woman” and his seventh wife, Sarah Eliza Johnson, married both women on the same day(1855); his eighth wife, Mary Lucretia Horr (1856); his ninth wife, Martha Diana Case Howland (1856); and his tenth wife Mary Jane Hetherington (1859). He has somewhere between 36 and 39 children. Hickman was re-baptized by proxy into the LDS Church on May 5, 1934.

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GENEALOGIST- TRAPPER NELSON

We visited the Trapper Nelson Zoo Historic District in Jonathan Dickinson State Park, Hobe Sound, Florida, which was Trapper Nelson’s former campsite. He wasn’t a Nelson by birth but would have been a fun relative.

As a child, he began earning money by trapping animals, such as muskrats, in the marshes of New Jersey. His parents did not speak English, so Nelson would often assist them in translating to make sure they were not taken advantage of. However, when his mother died and his father remarried, “Trapper” Nelson ran away from home, heading west.

Hopping freight trains, Nelson first ended up in Colorado, then eventually in Mexico. While there, he was arrested by the Federales under suspicion of gun running. He spent time in a Mexican jail and was later released. Nelson later claimed his release was because he “wrecked their food budget”.

After his release, Nelson headed back east with 10 cents to his name. He made money for food by gambling with other road bums until he made it to South Florida, where he, his stepbrother Charles Nelson, and friend John Dykas set up camp. Nelson and his partners settled on the beach by the Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the late 1920s. Bessie DuBois, wife of John DuBois, recalled seeing him for the first time in 1927 or 1928.

The DuBoises owned a restaurant that Nelson would frequent, and Bessie made note of his eccentric eating habits: “He would order a pie—not a piece of pie, mind you, but a pie—and he’d eat the whole thing right in front of me”. He ate ice cream by the half-gallon, and there were stories that he once ate 18 eggs for breakfast.

Things did not stay peaceful for long. On December 17, 1931, Charles Nelson shot his partner, John Dykas, in the back, killing him. Trapper Nelson, angered by his stepbrother’s actions, testified against him at the trial for Dykas’ murder. Charles was given a 20-year sentence. Disillusioned with civilization, Nelson withdrew from the beach, settling deep in the woods on the Loxahatchee River that same December. Using what little money he had and money borrowed from his sister, he bought 800 acres.

Physically imposing at 6’4″ and 240 pounds, he lived by trapping, hunting, and fishing in what was then wild country. He made money by selling the furs of the animals he trapped and ate the meat, which started rumors that he ate everything from opossums to stray house cats. He acquired extensive land holdings, bidding on tax auctions during the Great Depression. He would, on occasion, bid against Judge C. E. Chillingworth, the judge who had handed down his stepbrother’s sentence, and the two eventually became friends. When Chillingworth was murdered in the 1950s, Charles Nelson was briefly considered a suspect. Genealogist.

Trapping could only bring Nelson income seasonally, and as south Florida became a popular tourist destination, he came up with a new way to earn money. He eventually developed a zoo on his property in the 1930s, calling it “Trapper Nelson’s Zoo and Jungle Gardens”. His camp and zoo became popular tourist attractions. Tours along the river from West Palm Beach would stop there for lunch and stretch breaks, and Nelson shared the profits with the boat captains.

Locally prominent people and celebrities alike visited, including boxing champion Gene Tunney and actor Gary Cooper, to see his animals, watch Nelson wrestle alligators, and buy souvenirs. With his new fame came notoriety. He was known locally as the “Tarzan of the Loxahatchee” and cared for the locals’ exotic pets.

The zoo was eventually shut down by state health inspectors in 1960. After his zoo was closed, Nelson became a hermit and suffered from undiagnosed health problems. In 1968, he was found dead from a gunshot wound in his cabin by a friend. His death was ruled a suicide.

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GENEALOGIST- MORE ABOUT THE LADIES

With an extra day on a trip to Montana several years ago, I saw an opportunity to tour a type of place we had not seen before. The Dumas Brothel Museum in Butte (pictured below) didn’t have set visiting hours, so we stopped by, rang the bell, and ended up getting a private tour.

In the 1870s, a group of women, called “ladies of the line”, began selling sexual services on Park Street, in the north of the city of Butte, Montana. When the tents and shacks on the street were replaced with legitimate businesses some years later, the “Park Street girls”, as they had come to be known, moved to the south of the city. By the mid-1880s, a variety of dance halls, gambling houses, and saloons had appeared in the town.

By 1888, Butte’s East Galena Street was lined with brothels; in fact, nearly every building on the street housed prostitution. This area of Galena Street would come to be known as the “twilight zone”. Paramount to these establishments was the Casino Theater, a mixture of a saloon, dance hall, and brothel. In the late 19th century, several prominent Montanans owned brothels in Butte, including Lee Mantle, who would later become a United States senator, and Anton M. Holter, a wealthy businessman from Helena, Montana.

Two French Canadian brothers, Joseph and Arthur Nadeau, would eventually acquire the most property in Butte’s prostitution areas, or “red light district”. The brothers built a brothel in 1890 on 45 East Mercury Street and named it for Delia Nadeau, née Dumas, Joseph’s wife. By the turn of the century, there were three high-class sex houses in Butte: The Hotel Victoria, the Windsor Hotel, and the Dumas Brothel, also called the Dumas Hotel.

The Dumas Brothel Museum is a two-story brick building on the north side of East Mercury Street in the historic city of Butte, Montana. It also includes a basement level containing clandestine tunnels. A single-story addition was added to the rear of the main structure in 1912, leading directly onto the infamous brick-lined “Venus Alley”, once the hub of Butte’s red-light district.

The original structure features original vaulted skylights, and the upper level is surrounded by an interior balcony, which still provides a bird’s-eye view for onlookers to glimpse the suites (or “cribs”) below. The basement provided more basic accommodation and was built to connect the Dumas to Butte’s business corridor via a tunnel system.

Scant details are known about the early history of the Dumas Brothel; however, two early boarders of the house listed their occupations as “gambler” and “saloon man” in census records. By 1900, the brothel was occupied by Madam Grace McGinnis and her Chinese servant, who also worked as a prostitute. The cost of sex in the brothel at the turn of the 20th century was fifty cents, with the working girls receiving about 40 percent of that amount. Despite the size of the brothel, by 1902, Madame McGinnis had only five working girls and a musician under her employment. In 1903, Dumas and businesses like it in Butte’s red light district were unusually lucrative ventures.

These businesses were frequented by miners from the local Anaconda Copper Mining Company. That year, traffic grew to a point where the Dumas’s operations had to be expanded, building “cribs” (tiny cubicles where the girls worked) in the basement of the house. There were several ways potential clients could access the brothel. A back door of the Dumas opened into Pleasant Alley, near South Wyoming Street, which was the busiest section of Butte’s red-light area. A staircase from the front sidewalk also provided access to the basement cribs. Even though the Dumas operated 24 hours a day with several girls taking three shifts, by 1910, only two women were reported to be actually living there.

Instead, the prostitutes lived in other parts of Pleasant Alley and commuted to the brothel for their shifts. In Butte, the activities of the city’s prostitutes were generally restricted to Galena and Mercury Street. From the windows of their street-facing cribs, the girls would attract prospective clients while being in varying stages of undress. The Butte Miner, a local newspaper, explained how the girls did this:

“With an abandon that has no trace of modesty in it, these women lean out of their windows and address the vilest kind of language imaginable to people passing on the street, or else boldly make their appearance on the thoroughfare and visit from one crib to another.”

The Dumas’s business and those like it were criticized by several people who sought to reform the red light district. Reverend William Biederwolf condemned Butte as “the lowest sinkhole of vice in the west,” and he saw “enough legitimate vice in Butte to damn the souls of every young man and young woman in it.” Biederwolf held revival services for residents, which attracted “rounders, gamblers and habitués of the red-light district”. However, the local business benefited and even depended on the support of the sex workers at the Dumas and other establishments like it. The prostitutes would buy their dresses at local clothiers, frequent the city’s dry cleaners, and would patronize Chinese herbalists, looking for birth control potions and venereal disease remedies.

To ensure that their operations were unhampered, the girls at the Dumas would pay the city’s police and governance five-dollar “fines”. Instead of the closing or relocating the red-light district, the mayor and police of Butte ordered that the women wear longer skirts and high-necked blouses and that they “refrain from any indecent exposures.” After these ordinances were put in place, the Butte Miner reported that “nothing was seen in the district except long dresses and long faces. What the women say about the matter is not fit for publication.” By 1910 the people were petitioning Mayor Charles Nevin to shut down the district; with the district contributing two thousand dollars to the city’s coffers every month, the efforts eventually died.

In 1913, the brothel underwent further expansion. A one-story structure was added to the building, increasing the number of cribs by eight; four of the added cribs opened directly onto Pleasant Alley, which was then known as Venus Alley. When copper prices increased, the more than 14,000 miners in the city experienced a pay rise of twenty-five cents, injecting an additional $6,000 into Butte’s economy. The Dumas also experienced an upswing in patronage. As a result of the increased patronage, the brothel added five partitions and a staircase in 1916, and the ground floor, once a grand parlor, was partitioned into individual rooms, or cribs.

World War I and Prohibition prompted local lawmakers to initiate a crackdown on Butte’s red-light district; by 1917, the district was effectively closed. Signs saying “Men Under 21 Keep Out” were commonplace, and in the next census, prostitution had disappeared entirely as a declared profession in Butte. The Dumas, however, continued to operate. In 1925, Anne Vallet began overseeing the Dumas for the Nadeau family, and in the 1930s, operations passed on to Madam Rose Davis. In 1940, Lillian Walden and her husband Dick began running the brothel, raising the price of sex at the brothel to $2.

Three years later, the U.S. government ordered all brothels shut down to prevent the spread of venereal diseases among soldiers in World War II. In response, the Dumas began operating even more furtively, now under the guise of being a boardinghouse. The “window-shopping” was abandoned altogether, and a heavy steel door was installed at the back of the Dumas, featuring a small sliding window. Customers would only gain entrance after the sliding window was opened and their identity was verified. Additionally, doorbells were added, and a code system for dealing with troublesome guests was also employed.

When Lillian Walden retired in 1950, the price for service at the brothel was $5. Afterwards, the Dumas’s operations went to Elinore Knott. The Nadeaus also ceased being owners of the brothel around this time. Knott’s management of the Dumas was short. In 1955, she committed suicide after her lover died of a heart attack. When the late 1960s came about, several local police officers were taking the initiative to close the three operating high-class sex houses: Hotel Victoria, Windsor Hotel, and the Dumas. The Dumas did not remain closed for long, however, with its next madam, Bonita Farren, operating it from 1955 until her death from cancer in 1969. In 1970, the Dumas was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a “Victorian Brothel” and an active house of prostitution. Genealogist.

By the following year, Ruby Garret, a resident of Butte for some thirty years, had purchased the Dumas. Garret would pay local police officers and officials $200 to $300 a month in return for their silence about the Dumas’s activities. Under Garrett, the cost of a prostitute was $20. She would face financial difficulties, however, after being charged with tax evasion in 1981. The Dumas Brothel was closed the following year.

In 1982, Ruby Garrett, the last madam of the Dumas, was convicted of federal tax evasion and served six months in prison. The brothel was closed soon after, but not before a robbery took place there. When it closed, it was the longest operating brothel in the United States, having operated for 92 years, long after prostitution was outlawed.

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GENEALOGIST- LEAVING OUT GOING OVERSEAS FROM YOUR MILITARY STORY

My dad had always told us that even though he was drafted into the USMC during the Korean War, he was assigned to an Engineering platoon within the newly founded (1951) Cold Weather Battalion in the Toiyabe National Forest, near Bridgeport, CA. He also referred to it as Pickel Meadows. Today, it is known as the USMC Mountain Warfare Center. He told us that, aside from the training time at Camp Pendleton, he was assigned there for the entire two years of his enlistment.

That whole story went sideways, when after my dad’s passing we met up with his marine corps buddy, who lived at a ranch southwest of the entrance to Sequoia National Park, where at 91, he still ran his own HVAC business, wore the same size pants he wore in the corps, and came home to a Bud Light, and for dessert praline ice cream. He lived until 94 when he fell out of a tree he was trimming with a heart attack.

We were talking, and I brought up the odds of a Marine not being deployed to Korea at the time, as they were staying stateside. He said, “We did go to Korea. After crossing the ocean, they landed and dug their foxholes. Then, their command came along to inform them that the truce had been signed, and they were heading back home”.

I thought that his 70-some-year-old memory had failed him until he retrieved a scrapbook full of pictures, which included my dad on the ship on the way to Korea. Indeed, there were no ships full of Marines in the High Sierra. Genealogist.

I asked his buddy why he thought that he never told my mom or us kids. He said he didn’t know, but it could be that he was embarrassed because they never got into combat, or it could be survivor’s guilt, as they were of the generation, like WW2 vets, that didn’t talk much about their time in the service. I know he was not fond of his time and never encouraged any of us kids to join the military.

I sent away for his military file, and according to it, his unit was at Camp Pendleton for the entire two years. After visiting the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico, I was advised to order his command chronology and never got a response, so I’ll keep trying to find out.

I came across this article on survival school, and I wonder if he went through that course.

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GENEALOGIST- LEAVING OUT GOING OVERSEAS FROM YOUR MILITARY STORY

We visited the Royal Observatory Greenwich and saw and learned many things about astronomy, time, and measurement.

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, is situated on a hill in Greenwich Park in southeast London, overlooking the River Thames to the north. It played a significant role in the history of astronomy and navigation. Because the Prime Meridian passed through it, it gave its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the precursor to today’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

The observatory was commissioned in 1675 by King Charles II, with the foundation stone being laid on 10 August. The old hilltop site of Greenwich Castle was chosen by Sir Christopher Wren, a former Savilian Professor of Astronomy, because Greenwich Park was a royal estate, so no new land needed to be bought. At that time the King also created the position of Astronomer Royal, to serve as the director of the observatory and to “apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, to find out the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation.” He appointed John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal. The building was completed in the summer of 1676. The building was often called “Flamsteed House”, in reference to its first occupant. Genealogist.

The scientific work of the observatory was relocated to other locations in stages during the first half of the 20th century. The Greenwich site is now maintained almost exclusively as a museum, although the AMAT telescope became operational for astronomical research in 2018.

Above, the Shepherd Gate Clock at the gates of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. This clock shows Greenwich Mean Time all year round, ie, it is not set to British Summer Time in the summer.

Below is a picture of the Imperial standard lengths on the wall of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London – 1 yard (3 feet), 2 feet, 1 foot, 6 inches (1/2-foot), and 3 inches. The separation of the inside faces of the marks is exact at an ambient temperature of 60 °F (16 °C), and a rod of the correct measure, resting on the pins, will fit snugly between them.

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GENEALOGIST- ASKING YOUR HORSE TO HEAD STARBOARD

Mounted Boy Scout Troop 290 of Ocracoke, North Carolina, is one of the few mounted troops in the history of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). The troop was founded by United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Marvin Howard in 1954 and was active for about 10 years.

They rode the feral Banker horses of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. These horses descended from horses that had either survived shipwrecks or early explorations from the 1500s to 1700s along the Outer Banks. The first horses on Ocracoke may have been from Sir Richard Grenville’s ship, Tiger, which ran aground on Ocracoke in 1565. Solid documentation of the ponies on Ocracoke goes back to the 1730s.

The Ocracoke ponies are different from other ponies in that they possess five instead of six lumbar vertebrae and 17 instead of 18 ribs. They also differ from standard horses in shape, color, size, posture, and weight.

Though the ponies roamed free, they were considered livestock. In 1953, when the Cape Hatteras National Seashore was created, the Park Service banned free-roaming livestock on the island. Efforts have been made to preserve the horses and improve their bloodline.

This troop is the only mounted troop in the history of the BSA. In summer 1954, ten horses were taken from the Ocracoke herd as a project for Boy Scout Troop 290, and almost every age-eligible boy on the island joined the troop. The Scouts had to catch, tame, train, and teach the ponies to eat hay instead of their native feed.

Individual Scouts worked part-time to own their own pony, equipment, and horse feed. The horses, which were comfortable in the water, proved difficult to catch. The horses were taught to respond to “port” and “starboard” instead of “gee” and “haw”. The Bankers were ridden in parades, especially on July 4, and used as mounts during programs to spray mosquito-ridden salt marshes. The troop made regular trips to the region’s Pirates Jamboree and horse races in Buxton, North Carolina, as well as for horseback hunting and camping. Genealogist.

In 1959, the North Carolina legislature and the National Park Service ordered the ponies removed from all the Outer Banks islands because of overgrazing. However, the legislature and Park Service were persuaded to make an exception for the Scouts’ ponies as long as they were penned and taught to eat hay. In the 1960s, the National Park Service also began taking care of a small herd kept on 180 acres at the northern end of the island in a pasture known as the Ocracoke Pony Pens. Then the BSA demanded that the Scouts buy insurance to continue riding the ponies, which they could not afford. As a result, the troop folded about 10 years after it was formed. The pony pasture also became too expensive. When Troop 290 became defunct, there were few ponies left. The Park Service took control of the ponies in the late 1960s.

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GENEALOGIST- PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY

Reach out to Dancestors Genealogy. Our genealogists will research, discover, and preserve your family history. No one is getting any younger, and stories disappear from memory every year, eventually fading from our ability to find them.

Preserve your legacy and the heritage of your ancestors. Genealogist.

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Ready to embark on your family history journey? Don’t hesitate. Call Dan Nelson and get your project started!