Chester Scott, Part Two: Alive in Bakersfield

     In the first installment of this genealogical saga, I said that upon the release of my great-great-grandfather Chester Scott from prison in 1905, there were no more records of him.  Based on the dearth of documentation, I assumed that he had been rejected by both his family of origin and his wife Mina, and that the unspecified injuries that prompted the commutation of his sentence were severe enough that the rest of his story must have been brief, anonymous, and bleak: "My intuition tells me that he didn't live long after 1905, that he died obscurely and his remains are in a potter's field somewhere." 

 

     It turns out he lived another 45 years, and his remains are interred in a neatly manicured cemetery in Bakersfield, California.  The grave is not marked, but cemetery records say this is the place.

       The clue that unlocked the rest of the story (and discredited my theory) is the photograph above, a family portrait taken in a Bakersfield front yard in 1941.  I came across it in an attic-stored box of memorabilia that once belonged to my father's mother (she would have been the daughter-in-law of Belle Scott Veal, Chester's daughter).  Some kind relative who knew all the players had written long explanations on the back of who everyone in the photo is and their relationship to each other.  On the front row, far right, that's Chester Scott.  THE Chester Scott, “the notorious train robber whose exploits in criminal annals are known throughout the country" (The Lafayette Advertiser).  Age 73, a widower, living in the home of Arthur Phillips, his eldest stepson (far left, front row), who appears unfazed that he harbors an infamous reprobate under his roof.

 

      So my speculation about Chester's fate turned out to be way wrong.  I suppose I was under the spell of some politically-tinted preconceptions, envisioning Chester crushed in the gears of mass media and economic exploitation and cruel social judgment and a merciless penal system.  

     I guess I got carried away.  

     Here’s my best guess at what actually happened.  By the time the Morrow Brothers had been captured and convicted, it was evident to many that Chester's life sentence for murder had been a miscarriage of justice:  it was Ben Morrow who shot the sheriff. Chester did not shoot the sheriff. He also did not shoot the deputy. Unfortunately, that doesn't scan, so there would be no catchy protest song, nor would there be any FREE CHESTER bumperstickers.  What finally tipped the scales in his favor was having advocates of the right caste. I came across a couple of 1898 reports that his case had become a cause célèbre among society women in Rome.  An especially cringey item from the Chattanooga Times, with accompanying cartoon (see right) said the women of Rome had resolved "to exert themselves to secure Chester Scott's pardon . . . The ladies usually have most excellent intentions, but sometimes they display most miserable judgment."  (When the recaptured Chester was brought through Chattanooga five years earlier, the same newspaper had suggested that he was too good looking to be guilty - there's "judgment" for you).  But the women of Rome were not alone.  Participants in the posse that had pursued him, members of the jury that had convicted him, plus “prominent citizens" of Floyd and Gordon Counties pleaded convincingly on Chester's behalf.  The parole board reduced his sentence from life to 20 years (no pardon - there was still that robbery to answer for).  Of course in pushing for a lighter sentence he had his race going for him.  In Georgia of that era (and really well into our time), the capacity to conjure up advocates as potent as Chester's was limited to white people.  A black counterpart - similarly culpable, similarly subjected to an overly harsh sentence, but without "prominent citizens" to champion his cause - would not have seen the outside of prison again.  If he even made it that far.  Had a black suspect been in Chester’s shoes back in 1892, accused of killing a sheriff, the abortive lynching that the authorities feared for Chester and Ben Morrow had a decent chance of coming to pass after all. In that year, the worst year nationally for lynchings, of 24 reported lynchings in Georgia, 22 were of black men.  

     Chester Scott, of the favored demographic, got a jury trial, then a sentence reduction, and finally - in 1905 - clemency. The official reason he was released early - that he had been badly injured in "service to the state", presumably on some work detail - is quite believable:  the use of convict labor to mine coal in Dade County was so notoriously brutal that the practice was abolished there altogether not long after Chester’s release.  I still do not know the exact nature of his injuries, but apparently they were bad enough to get him sent home to Gordon County but not bad enough to prevent him from courting a widow, Martha Phillips, once he got there.  She was several years older than he was.  Just like Mina, the first Mrs. Scott.

       The status of that relationship when Chester came home is part of the mystery. The 1900 census identifies Mina as married.  Was that still true in 1905? And if it was, how was the supposedly still married Chester Scott able to make time with a widow just one county over from his lawful wife? Significant age difference, catastrophic injury, the ignominy of a two-timing husband - nothing was going to stop Chester and Martha from plighting their damn troth!  Actually, although I have not found anything to confirm that things were legally over between Chester and Mina, there's also nothing to suggest they were still together in any way, legal or otherwise. His total absence from the public record of his wife and children, other than their continued use of his last name, is telling.  The authorities, too, seemed to regard him as eligible.  When Chester and his new girl Martha got around to tying the knot in September of 1906, they did it in Gordon County, where his history and status had to be well known. Could a suspected bigamist have obtained a marriage license this authentic in his home county?

Mina Scott's take on these developments can be inferred from the way her marital status appears on documents for the next few years.  The 1910 census identifies her as a widow.  So does the Rome city directory.  That woman knew how to say, "You're dead to me."  

     When and how had Chester Scott and Martha Phillips met? I believe they had known each other for a long, long time.   She might have first encountered him as a snot-nosed kid in the household of her fiancee. In 1870, the census tells us, Chester was three years old, living in the Gordon County home of his father Thomas J. Scott (57) and his mother Letitia (41).  Chester was the last child of many for old Thomas.  Also living in the household was Samuel Phillips.  He was 21.  That's 18 years older than Chester.  And he wasn't a Scott.  My first surmise was that he was a hired man, or maybe a local kid who had been taken in because his folks had died in the war. But here the notes on the back of the 1941 photograph foil my speculation again:  Arthur Phillips (front left) is identified as the grandson of Thomas J. Scott's wife, "Letitia Lee Anne (Kinnan) Phillips." So Samuel and Chester were half brothers:  Letitia was mother to them both, the older one a son from her first marriage, welcomed into her new husband's household.   

     Some time in the 1870s this Samuel Phillips married Martha Elizabeth Carlile, 10 years his junior, a native of Arkansas.  When Samuel and Martha were courting did she happen to meet his young half-brother Chester?  (I'm imagining a Waltons episode where young Jim-Bob pesters John-Boy and his new girlfriend because he has a secret crush on her).  If they did meet in Georgia, it could only have been briefly: the 1880 census has Samuel and Martha as residents of Excelsior, Arkansas (it seems to have been a kind of Western outpost for the Scotts of Gordon County, Georgia).  Over the next few years they had a lot of kids - Arthur (1884) was the first.  But in 1899 they were back in Georgia. Samuel had TB and had probably come home to die.  His passing left Martha Phillips, then pushing 40, in a real fix: she was a widow with seven children. Fortunately, just a few years later, Chester Scott, her late husband's kid half-brother, became available (and willing) to jump into the breach.   

    The circumstances that gave rise to this 1906 marriage are mighty peculiar. 35 years before, Samuel and Chester had been half-brothers in the same household, one of them a grown man living under his step-father's roof, the other a little boy with train robbery in his future, and somehow each of them wound up married to Martha. That weird family history, that rural Southern setting - much too warped for the Waltons, more like a Faulkner novel. One can imagine a gothic coalescence of old debts and dark secrets and unhealthy desire impelling Chester and Martha to the altar like a pair of dissipated Northwest Georgia Compsons.  Were there covert deals?   Had Chester's people finagled his discharge from prison under the condition that he assume responsibility for the widow and her family? Was Martha forced, for the welfare of her children, to enter in to a relationship she found repellent?  Had the Scotts engineered a divorce from Mina? Of course there's also a less scandalous explanation: Chester really was injured, Mina really was through with him, and this union was just a practical arrangement between two desperate people  - Martha needed help and security, Chester needed to be taken in - and old time family loyalties were there to provide the final impetus.  History is full of such marriages. Chester became not just half-uncle but step-father to Martha's children, and before long they were in Arkansas.  Recall that it was here where Chester hid out for several weeks after escaping from the Rome jail 1893. I wonder if that adventure was somehow connected to Samuel and Martha (one newspaper article said that a family network had provided cover for Chester).  When he returned to Arkansas fifteen years later, Martha on his arm, there were no lawmen in hot pursuit.  Chester and his new family made their home at a wide place in the road called Bass Little. The 1910 census has him working as a railway brakeman (background checks must have been a little spotty back then).  In 1920 he was managing a hotel.  It cannot have been much of a hotel, Bass Little being so small.     

      The truly striking thing about Bass Little, the thing that adds to my sense that this whole ancestral muddle was orchestrated by the gods just to jerk me around, is that it is located in Sebastian County, whose county seat is Fort Smith, where much of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit is set.  I know True Grit is a work of fiction.  I know it isn’t real. I know that as an adult its narrator Mattie Ross lives in Yell County, not Sebastian County, and that Chester was a married man by the time he lived in Arkansas.  But consider the flights of fancy my mind went on when I got the news that Chester was in shouting distance of Mattie Ross during the period of her life of which she says

I never had time to get married but it is nobody's business if I am married or not married. I care nothing for what they say. I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to and make him cashier. I never had time to fool with it. A woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for is at some disadvantage, although I will say I could have had two or three untidy old men around here who had their eyes fastened on my bank. No thank you!

 

The idea of my great great grandfather ineptly courting Mattie Ross is just too wonderful not to entertain.  There’s old Chester, trying to summon what’s left of the good looks that charmed the Chattanooga Times and impress her with his train robber bona fides.  Unfortunately,  he only reminds her of Lucky Ned Pepper’s dimwit accomplices.  “Criminal trash!” she thinks, turning her attention to a ledger that doesn’t add up.    

 I need a second to breathe.  

     Back to reality.  In 1928 Martha died.  She had been able to live out her days in Arkansas, and by then she and Chester had completed the job of raising all those kids and sending them out into the world.  Within a few years of her death, Chester had made his last move, to Bakersfield.  Go west, untidy old man.  He spent the last 18 years of his life there, in Arthur's house, where the front yard photo was taken.  Just one year before the photo he had been declared "deceased" on his first wife Mina's death certificate, back in Georgia.  A classic American story - to be alive and well out West, having left your Eastern self for dead. 

      By the way, in my original research I had come across this Chester Scott of Arkansas, with his wife Martha and their many children, but I did not believe he could be the same Chester Scott of Rome, Georgia, husband of Mina, that I had been studying.  No way.  The kid situation didn't add up - he would have to have spent the 1880s and 1890s being in Georgia and Arkansas simultaneously, fathering children at the same time with two different wives.  What I hadn't accounted for was the possibility of the children listed on the Arkansas census actually being his step-children.  I noticed with astonishment that Arkansas Chester was only 13 years older than his "son" Arthur.  That should have tipped me off.  But it is easy enough for the obtuse to attribute such weirdness to a bungling census taker, or to the social peculiarities of the 19th century rural South, and that's what I did.

  

When Chester and Martha married, Arthur Phillips was 21, too old to need a step-father.  And as the eldest son of a dead father with a (half) uncle as his step father, he was kind of an Arkansas Hamlet, with Chester as an ex-con Claudius.  All this makes me wonder how Chester managed to secure 18 years in Arthur's household out there in Bakersfield at the end of his life.  How could Arthur have felt enough of a sense of obligation to Chester to permit that long of a stay?  Of course Martha could have extracted a promise from her son to take care of Chester.  Maybe Arthur was just finishing the job his father Samuel started in Arkansas back in 1893, giving shelter to the fugitive. I don’t even know if Chester was comfortable in Arthur's house, or that he wasn’t deeply resented.  But I hope it was a good set up born out of good motives, that Arthur, grateful to Chester for taking on burdensome roles of care and responsibility that would typically have gone to the eldest child of a widowed mother, didn’t need any convincing to set him up with a roof over his head.  I like a redemption story for Chester: he left prison under the cloud of his criminal past, saw a family he was connected to in need of help, and he helped.  

    In that photograph he doesn't look anything like the way I picture a train robber.  It surprises me.  But the more I have learned of him, the more I believe that in that episode of his life, he probably surprised himself, too.