1906

I'll call this tale "Love Gone Wrong."

Bear with me as I give a short genealogy explanation. Hollister Daniels's grandmother, Hannah Pendleton, was an early Oregon pioneer, arriving in Oregon in 1847 as a girl of ten. She married A. C. Daniels when she was 18 and their son, Samuel Thurston Daniels, was born the next year. Hannah and A.C. divorced by 1857.

Hannah married a D. Jasper Slover in 1858, then divorced him in 1862, claiming desertion the previous year.


By 1866, though, Hannah seems to have found true love. She married Robert Whitney of Hubbard and they went on to have nine children, Samuel's half siblings and Hollister's aunts and uncles. (As an adult, Hollister would refer occasionally to his "Whitney cousins." This was the family he was referring to.)

(In the photo, Samuel--Hollister's father--is seated in the front row, far right.)

Everyone in this photo is buried in the Hubbard Cemetery. While exploring the cemetery, before I knew very much about the Whitneys, I noticed that Lincoln Whitney's headstone showed he had died quite young. Born in 1884, he died in 1906.

When I was poking around in the Oregon State Archives, I came across a death certificate stating he'd died of a gunshot wound. In Portland. At 360 E. Harrison. In the city.

Curious, I put Lincoln Whitney on my list when I was searching old newspapers at the University of Oregon. Checking the Oregonian the day after his death, wow!, prominent story.

Orlando S. Murray shot and killed Lincoln C. Whitney yesterday morning at 8 o'clock. Murray says Whitney betrayed his sister, Miss Mary Murray, under promise of marriage and then refused to keep his word and save her from imminent disgrace. (The Oregonian is never more explicit than this, but we get the general idea.) The tragedy followed an earnest discussion as to whether or not Whitney should marry the sister. Murray did all the talking. He begged, coaxed, pleaded and finally threatened. Whitney was evasive until the very last. Murray then drew a 38-caliber revolver and fired three shots.

There was no objectivity in The Oregonian's reporting of the story. Orlando and Mary Murray were children of a prominent Portland physician.

For a week, the Murray family has been trying to hasten the marriage of the young couple. The father . . . went to Hubbard a week ago with Miss Mary and talked the matter over with young Whitney's father. The elder Whitney talked reasonably, but Dr. Murray says the boy's mother came out of the house, called his daughter a vile name and insulted him.

In a jailhouse interview, Orlando Murray is described as a big, good-natured boy, fond of home and of his sister, and is known to devote all his earnings to the household expenses. He described how his sister and Lincoln met. "My sister first met Whitney in the Marion County hopfields a year ago this past September," he said. "He called on her a number of times and we always treated him as one of the family. Then he invited her to spend a week with his parents and a second week with his sister, near Hubbard. During this time, he promised to marry her in two weeks and accomplished her downfall."

Historians have written of the hop harvest time in Oregon fields. City girls and boys would come out to the farms to work. The family photo many have seen of Samuel's workers after the hop harvest is an example of the size of the groups that would come to the farms.

Justice was swift in the turn-of-the-century Oregon and Orlando Murray went to trial the following month. After a one-day trial, the jury deliberated for forty minutes and returned with a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom crowd erupted in cheers and men and women who had never heard of him before he killed Lincoln Whitney fought their way forward to shake his hand and offer congratulations. . . . He remained in custody until the crowd dispersed and was then formally released. This was done at the request of Attorney Logan, not to protect young Murray from his friends, but as a precaution against possible violence from Whitney's friends.

The courtroom was a rough place. The defense attorney for Orlando Murray and Lincoln's brother-in-law came to blows. In his opening argument, the defense attorney had referred to the Whitneys as "that tribe." The defense attorney swung at Lincoln's brother-in-law, but The Oregonian assures us that was just a light blow in the face.

Lincoln Whitney's father, Robert Whitney, died the same day as Orlando Murray's aquittal. Hannah Whitney outlived them both, and Samuel as well, dying at age 86 in 1923.

Hollister was born in 1899 and was seven years old, living in Hubbard with his family when this all took place.