THE ELLERY FAMILY OF MIAMI AN EXTRACT FROM “THE CORNISH MINER IN AMERICA “ by Arthur C. Todd. But there is one Cornish family that has proved to be unusually rich in its recollections of Miami, the Ellerys: and their saga has been told by William J. Ellery, who has died since this chapter was written. It was related in conversations with him in Penzance after a visit to the cottage in Camborne where he was born; in Grass Valley; in motels en route for Death Valley and at Lone Pine; and in his study at Monrovia in California among photographs of himself standing by the statue of Sir Humphry Davy at Penzance and of his friend Chief Talkalai, the Apache captor of Geronimo. This tall, spare and gaunt Cornish Arizonian and Californian would have been one of the first to admit that his life history is but typical of the thousands who have left no record, and that its telling is justified only as a reminder to posterity of their hardships in the struggle to survive and to provide a fuller life for their children.
His father, John Ellery, and his mother, Fanny Williams, had both known poverty as children in the dank and unwholesome streets of Redruth. Youths like himself were plentiful and cheap, and at the age of twelve he was working at Dolcoath mine as a "tool boy", carrying the long and heavy drills up and down the wet and slimy ladders in the shafts. The hours were long, the risks of a broken leg ever present, and the pay small. This drab existence in darkness and steamy heat was the only life he knew until he became a tin-dresser. At the age of twenty-six he married a milliner, but their hopes seemed blighted almost from the start. His wife's mother was an invalid with none of her family near to support her; one son had been sent to Brazil as an assayer; another had already left for America and was to prove an unexpected blessing later in Arizona; a third was helplessly deaf and dumb. W. J. Ellery was born in 1887; and John Ellery lost his position as a tin-dresser as the mines, one after another, closed down. Heavily committed to his family responsibilities, John Ellery therefore made the decision to emigrate, leaving behind his wife to care for the two invalids and their two months old son.
For ten lean years, in Michigan and Colorado, he lived and worked, regularly sending money home and improving his position, but never pressing his wife to solve their problem by putting her mother away in some Poor Law institution, as she might well have done. But in 1896 she died and so Mrs. Ellery and their son, who had no memory of his father, were at last free to make the long journey to Guston, a silver camp, long since disappeared, on a mountain top in the Rockies between Ouray and Silverton, where the Denver and Rio Grande railroad clung to granite crags and spanned canyons and gorges over matchstick bridges. But their mountain idyll and their second honey-moon did not last long, for in 1897 the price of silver collapsed and the mine closed. So once more they were on the move, this time on a south-bound train to Globe, since John Ellery knew a Redruth miner there, Milt Williams, who promised him work, for the Old Dominion was short of hands.
W. J. Ellery remembers that it was not an easy journey, for his mother was nursing his three months' old brother: from Guston to Silverton by buckboard; by rail to Geronimo; finally a ride of sixty miles across the desert on a bumping stage through the Apache reservation with an overnight stay in the Indian town of San Carlos. But after six years the "old debil" again tapped them on the shoulder, there was a recession in 1903 and John Ellery found himself unemployed.
However, his father's brother-in-law, Edwin Nettell, was a mine captain in Grass Valley, and that connection was a sufficient guarantee of work if it was available. Having to leave Globe could not have come at a worse time, for his wife was ill and there were household debts, not unusual when miners were paid monthly. But the owner of the Old Dominion store, George W. P. Hunt, later Governor of Arizona, told them to pay when they could. Work at Grass Valley lasted only two years for John Ellery's mining life was suddenly brought to an end by a stroke. So now it became the turn of the son to make the sacrifice to support his family when he had completed only two years of his high school education. Delivery boy and assistant in Grass Valley shops, earning 50 dollars a month for a twelve-hour day, he nevertheless continued his education at night at the local business college, studying accountancy. Then came a slice of luck when his mother's brother in Globe offered him a post as book-keeper at 100 dollars a month. This new rate seemed princely until he remembered that he now had to support two households: his own lodgings in Globe cost 30 dollars and he remitted 60 dollars a month to his parents in Grass Valley. Then he was invited to be a book-keeper for the National Bank of Globe and, though it meant a reduction in salary, accepting proved to be the right decision.
In 1909 the bank decided to open a branch on Miami Flat in anticipation of the new mining town, where it was expected that there would be more saloons than shops and more miners and steelworkers than churchmen; and a steady hand was needed to pay out to the rough and ready workers. W. J. EIIery was chosen as the first cashier. Since there was no building that could be rented, he bought a frame store, 10 ft square, for 40 dollars, made a grill out of chicken wire, daubed the name of the bank on it with paint and waited for business. On 8 February 1909, the day before his chicken-coop bank opened, he might have been seen leaving Globe in a wagon driven by the "black pioneer", Alvin Booth, the descendent of a negro slave from Texas, with bags at their feet containing 50,000 dollars in cash, protected by one pearl-handled revolver between them. The first customer, who wanted the distinction of being "No. 1" on the books, was the owner of the bar in the red light district; he opened his account with the not inconsiderable receipts of the previous night. There was no strong room; the books had to be deposited each night in the safe over at FitzPatrick's saloon; and Ellery had to be both janitor and cashier, sleeping on an army cot with a .45 revolver under his pillow. Though he never had to use his weapon, for a young man of twenty-three these were anxious first days, for there was as yet no jail in Miami, drunks were locked in railroad box cars, and the magistrates imposed fines as they sat astride a barrel on the sidewalk outside the Palace Saloon.
From now onwards the Ellerys never looked back. As Miami was growing quickly and houses were difficult to find, with their carefully accumulated capital they built one for themselves and several others for rental until they had acquired a small but steady income. Then Ellery married, wisely choosing a wife who came of sound pioneer stock from Wisconsin; and their children represented the new America that was born and nurtured on the harsh frontier experiences of the old. One son graduated at the California Institute of Technology and founded his own firm of consulting engineers; another qualified at the University of California as a Doctor of Optometry; and a daughter read Social Science at Stanford. Later their father was promoted President of the Miami Bank and his brother Vice-President. In 1922 W. J. Ellery moved to California to take over the position of Vice-President of the Security First National Bank of Los Angeles and his brother in Miami distinguished himself as a financial expert, for during the depression, Governor Hunt invited him to be State Superintendent and Inspector of Banks. That the son of a Cornish miner should under-take such a responsibility at the time of the financial chaos in 1929 is probably unique; and what is quite astonishing is that there was no banking experience in the family at all: nothing but a rugged road of meagre resources, hardships and disappointments that ran all its twisted way from Redruth and Camborne.
The Cornish banker knew everyone in Miami For they trades their cheques over his counter. But none was more welcome in Ellery's office than the Apache Chief Talkalai who, wearing his feathered head-gear or an old battered sombrero, would chat the hours away, smoking a big black Owl cigar specially reserved for him. Not without reason he would conduct himself with as much dignity as if he were the President himself; raised on the San Carlos Reservation, he had been Chief of Scouts for the army under three generals: Crook, Miles and Howard; and for twenty-one years Chief of Police on his reservation. Few of the Cornish miners seeing him shuffle out of Ellery's bank realised that he had saved the life of Colonel John Clum when, with a detachment of Apache police, they had gone to Ojo in New Mexico, near the headwaters of the Gila River, 400 miles by trail from San Carlos, to capture Geronimo one April day in 1887. Later generations forgot how he had once been the guest of President Cleveland in the White House: and that his finest hour was in March 1930 when he was the guest of honour at the opening of the Coolidge Dam. Standing alongside the President, Colonel Clum and Will Rogers, he heard the guns boom and saw the waters rolling over the acres where his ancestors had once hunted; but the occasion proved too much for the old man, and they buried him in the white man's cemetery in Globe on Pascoe Hill, not far from the Cousin Jacks who also had helped to tame the tiger of Arizona.
By then, for Cousin Jacks almost everywhere, their sun had almost completed its descent. Gone were the days when they could step off the boat at New York with little money and no passport, knowing that, if they could ride rough as far as Globe, "Ma and Pa" Shugg would take them into their boarding house; and when W. J. Ellery went to school with the son of Hampton Blevins, one of the "hash riders" who was shot down by the Tewksbury "boys" in that bloody feud over the rights of sheepherders with the Grahams in the Tonto Basin that almost annihilated the two families. The old frontier his father knew was now halted before the huge gaping mouth of the open-cast pit, where the mechanical slaves of the modern industrial world grabbed and clawed at the low-grade ores, and management and men temporarily lost sight of each other. Strikes for union recognition embittered both; those of 1903 in the Clifton-Morenci district, when the National Guard and the Arizona Rangers were called out to restore order and protect property, were serious enough; but those of 1915-17, caused by the appearance of agitators from the militant Industrial Workers of the World, confused real economic grievances with left-wing political activity. In the summer of 1917 more than 1000 miners from Bisbee were hustled at bayonet point into a special train and driven into the desert of New Mexico where, without adequate supplies of food, water or shelter from the blistering heat, they were abandoned by their guards and left to fend for themselves. In Globe the miners refused to fly the Union flag over their Union Hall.
Though the surviving Cornish were reluctant to join the struggle and were more disposed to drive the I.W.W. agitators out of town, they knew that the day of the hard-rock miner was over, remembered only by the old-timers as they sat on the high steps of the Court House beneath the plaque to their friend Governor Hunt, whose persona influence and intervention alone had prevented widespread violence and bloodshed. Labour relations did improve in the 1920's but could no stop the depressions of the magnitude of 1929, when both manager and men found themselves without work. Oddly enough, it was their that pamphlets were published throughout Arizona advising prospectors how to search for gold and silver; and the skills that had one been locked in Cornish fingers and fists, the arts of drilling, blasting am timbering, were then no more than tables of instructions for destitute and inexperienced amateurs.
Sic transit gloria Cornubaie
Redruth ELLERY family history. back to famous ELLERYS
