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Fork-Tail Devil

The Biography of First Lieutenant Robert Carl Milliken (US Army Air Corps, 1942â"46) World War II Fighter Ace and Husband, Father, Grandfather, Great-Grandfather

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The Beginnings

For one hundred years commencing in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the primary form of transcontinental travel in the United States was by rail. The railroad ran on steam which was generated by the coal-fired boiler, making the various towns in Wyoming, which were separated by a network of six thousand miles of dirt roads, more accessible.

Towns such as Hanna could provide coal for rail transport. The trains of the Union Pacific Railroad ran east to west and west to east, and all stopped in Hanna for coal and water. Coal was mined in Hanna, and water was piped into Hanna from the hills near Elk Mountain, where it was stored in the Hanna reservoir. The importance of Hanna grew as coal became essential for other sources of energy, such as electricity, and the city became a prime target for men seeking work and also provided opportunities for those with entrepreneurial skills.

Hanna was a typical western town—the Wyoming breeze (a twenty-five-mile-per-hour wind) blew almost every day. Dust, tumbleweed, dogs, horses, the occasional feral cats, rats, mice, and sundry other animals from the nearby plains could be seen in the streets. The Ford Hotel (owned and operated by Mrs. Mary Ford, the widowed and later remarried mother of Dr. Stebner, the dentist) supplied comfortable accommodation for visitors, especially for schoolteachers who were brought in from other parts of the country to work in the local school. However, the schoolteachers were responsible for the costs of their own accommodation.

But this was not always the case, and the quality could vary, as a segment from the journal of Anna Doggett (who became Mother Anna) illustrates:

Before marrying Robert Milliken (Father Robert) I was a country school teacher when I first started to teach. My wages were from thirty five to fifty dollars per month over the period that I taught. Many of the small towns where I taught could not afford hotel accommodation so we were boarded in the town or the district around the town and usually fared fairly well. But it was anything but modern in terms of toilet facilities and comfort.

Sleeping accommodation did not always have any privacy—I once shared my bed with a nine year old girl. Another time I shared my room with the two children in the home—there was a curtain on a taught wire between my bed and the twin cots of the children.

The houses for the miners were simple and for the most part were owned by the Union Pacific Coal Company, and taxes on businesses were unknown. Virtually all businesses (with, it seems, the exception of the Ford Hotel) were owned by the coal company. Most of the houses had only cold water. Water was piped to each house, but the occupants were responsible for their own water heating, usually on the stove. The town water supply came courtesy of the Union Pacific Railroad from a dam in the nearby mountains that fed water into two reservoirs.

The company store provided most of the supplies and goods required by the families. The miners were paid in tokens (with an occasional cash payout) for use in the company store. The railroad also provided an ice house that was available to the Hanna populace. Ice was taken from a nearby frozen lake during the winter months.

A deputy sheriff lived in a house that sat on a hill overlooking the town, from where he could see most of the happenings in the town, some of which might be of concern to him. Any legal matters and differences in opinion, whatever the nature and cause, were first attended to by a lawyer whose name is lost in the mists of history, but he lived in Hanna and owned his own house. More serious cases were adjudicated by a judge in the law court at Rawlins.

It was into this environment that Robert Carl Milliken was born on June 6, 1922, at the Milliken home in Hanna. The birth was not easy for mother and baby. Fortunately, a doctor was present, and both mother and son survived.

But perhaps first things first ...

* * *

The records of the Milliken name show an ancient origin (pre-1100 AD), and the name was first used by the ancient Strathclyde-Briton people of the Scottish-English border country. The first Milliken family lived in Wigtown, a former royal burgh in the Machars of Galloway (the Plains of Galloway) in the southwest of Scotland. This burgh was first mentioned in an indenture of 1292, and the sheriff of the area was in existence in 1263.

The saga of the Milliken family in the United States began in the mid-nineteenth century when William Milliken, a native of Scotland and Bob's paternal great-grandfather, moved to Ireland to live in the city of Newtownards, County Down, just a short distance from Dublin. He was a weaver by trade, and he, with his wife Mary, moved to Ireland to serve as a Presbyterian missionary. His zeal for expansion of the church was almost unmatched.

At that time there were several hundred Presbyterians living in the area, and Great-Grandfather William was trying to organize them into a distinct church group that was to follow the Presbyterian way of life. To this end, in 1853 he sent a note to the Presbyterian inhabitants of Newtownards with the following message:

It is now upward of a year since a number of individuals impressed with the spiritual destitution of the humbler classes of the Town, established the Newtownards Town Mission. The actual amount of destitution was brought out in the Report read at the public meeting, held in August last, from which it appeared that upward of 400 Presbyterian Families were wholly unconnected with any House of Worship. The readiness with which these families have availed themselves of the agency established for their benefit has been manifested in the large attendance at the various meetings held in connection with the Mission. The result has been that a large number of those families, having gradually become anxious for the enjoyment of more extended spiritual privileges than a Town Mission is able to afford, have originated a movement of the attainment of this object and already attached their names to a document declaring their desire to be formed into a Congregation in which all ordnances of the Gospel may be administered to them. Their aim is simply to procure the enjoyment of all the means of grace for themselves, without interfering in the slightest degree with an existing Congregational interest. As a considerable interval must elapse before a meeting of the Presbytery occurs, at which their case could be laid before it—to prevent the families who have subscribed their names being scattered, and what they conceive to be a good work temporary checked; they have requested the Town Missionary to continue his labors amongst them, till they shall be regularly organized by the Presbytery, with which request he has complied.

They desire the sympathy of all who are in the enjoyment of those spiritual privileges which they wish to obtain for themselves, and in due time may call upon them for their assistance in carrying out the proposed object.

Signed on behalf of the Committee of the above Families, William Milliken. Newtownards, 15th February, 1853

However, Great-Grandfather William's efforts were often interrupted by religious (often sectarian) violence. During one demonstration he was dragged through the street by his beard. He was a very stern individual and even such treatment—his injuries were not recorded or mentioned by him to anyone—did not deter him from his task.

His missionary activities and thoughts were at a high peak, and his stern nature, embedded in him by his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, caused his son—John Milliken, born in 1854, eventually known as Grandfather John—to be dissatisfied with that style of living, so he left Ireland in 1869 at the ripe old age of fifteen to go it alone and make a life for himself elsewhere. Initially, John had just wanted to live elsewhere with his brother Robert, a mine superintendent living and working in Scotland, in the area of Blair castle, the ancient seat of the Dukes and Earls of Atholl. But John's feelings for elsewhere ran deep, and his thoughts were for open plains and grasslands. The United States was trying to recover from the costly Civil War that had decimated the available manpower—immigrants either with education or a strong work ethic were more than welcome.

Robert was an engineering graduate of the University of Edinburgh who came to Pennsylvania to run a coal mine in Shenandoah, Schuylkill County. He was to be a victim of the group known as the Molly Maguires—a nineteenth-century secret society of mainly Irish and Irish American coal miners who were active in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania between the time of the Civil War until a series of sensational arrests and trials from 1876–78.

Robert was warned by the priest's sister that he was in imminent danger—the reason for this is not known—and left town with a young family to go to Rock Springs, Wyoming. He later went to Coal Creek, Colorado, where he died in 1898 at the age of about fifty-two as the result of a mine accident where he was the superintendent of the Rockvale Mines. He, his wife Jean Tait Milliken, and his son George Washington Milliken are buried in a family plot in the Highland Union Cemetery, Florence, Colorado. Rockvale and Coal Creek were mining towns near Florence. Robert's eldest sons, William Boyd Milliken and JohnTait Milliken, graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1893 and 1894, respectively. William Boyd's grandson, W.B. Milliken III, also graduated from the School of Mines.

* * *

After a sojourn with his brother, who had moved on to the United States, Grandfather John decided to seek his fortune elsewhere. He moved further afield and followed Robert to the United States, where opportunities were available to the ordinary working men that were not available in Great Britain (now called the United Kingdom). His first stop was Pennsylvania, followed in 1875 by the move to Carbon, and thereafter to Hanna—both mining towns in the High Plains of Wyoming. He had heard of the coal being mined in the area and knew that there would be work.

Ignoring the risk, he traveled to the High Plains, intrigued by outcroppings in the mountains that ranged around the area, seeing the occasional prospector who still believed that a fortune was to be made from gold and silver, especially silver that had been discovered in bounteous veins to the south in the Arizona Territory. But precious metals were never discovered in great quantities in Wyoming, although a small amount of gold was discovered near South Pass—the lowest point (7,412 feet elevation) on the Continental Divide in the western part of the state—prompting a small rush in the 1860s. The vast majority of prospectors were misinformed, as coal was the black gold of the future.

These were difficult times, and the life was not smooth. One year after John Milliken's arrival in Hanna, on June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and his ill-fated Seventh Cavalry were annihilated at the Little Big Horn.

To give this story more perspective—at about this same time, John Henry Holliday (aka Doc Holliday) was in Cheyenne (Wyoming territory). He had realized that gambling at cards was more to his liking than dentistry, and was making his way by this roundabout route south to Arizona Territory where he would eventually meet with the Earp brothers and join them in the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral on October 26, 1881. Holiday had the misfortune to have his wallet and its monetary contents removed or commandeered from his person by an unfriendly highwayman just outside of Cheyenne.

Needless to say, Doc Holiday was not amused—which did nothing to improve Holiday's somewhat poor disposition toward others. So much for the brief sojourn by Doc Holiday on the High Plains of Wyoming. After the gunfight, his deteriorating health finally led him to settle in the high-altitude town of Leadville, Colorado, for many years, along with many other well-known names of that era. He died of tuberculosis at age 36 on November 8, 1887, in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

* * *

The High Plains are a subregion of the Great Plains in the central United States, generally encompassing the western part of the Great Plains on the east side of the Rocky Mountains.

The eastern boundary of the High Plains is often cited as the 100th meridian or the 1,968-foot contour or elevation line. But prairie vegetation boundaries are flexible, advancing or retreating in response to the weather. Located in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, the High Plains of southeastern Wyoming rise in elevation to over 6,000 feet and are semiarid, receiving between ten and twenty inches of precipitation annually. Prairie short-grass, prickly pear cacti, and scrub vegetation (mostly sagebrush) cover the region, with occasional buttes or other rocky out crops. The arid nature of the region necessitates either dry-land farming methods or irrigation, taking water from the underlying aquifers. The High Plains of Wyoming have significant coal deposits as well as petroleum and natural gas reservoirs.

In contrast to the states and territories to the south, which in the mid-to-late nineteenth century were rich sources of silver, the High Plains of Wyoming are a major source of coal, oil, gas, and uranium for the nation. For example, the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana is home to the largest low-sulfur coal reserves in the United States. Low-sulfur coal burns cleaner than the high-sulfur coal found in the eastern United States. The coal in the Powder River Basin is found in thick seams—horizontal layers of solid coal running for miles beneath the earth's surface. Some of these seams are a hundred feet thick and close to the surface, so the coal can be mined without going far underground. As a result, huge quantities of low-cost, high-quality coal can be shipped by rail to more than twenty states to generate electricity.

* * *

Mining was a difficult way to survive, both at work, which occupied most of a miner's waking hours, and at home, where family life was restricted to a few hours of waking time each day. Because of the long hours, lack of family life, and harsh working conditions (not necessarily in that order), the miners became increasingly militant. Hence unionization was born, and there was a strong tendency to view all mine owners and superintendents as enemies of the miners. The mine owners (on both sides of the Atlantic) refused to acknowledge the simple equations:

Dissatisfied miners = no miners

No miners = no coal production

No coal production = no sales of coal

No sales of coal = no profits

No profits = close the mine

Because of the attitudes of industry owners toward workers, the workers were entering a new phase in which they began to realize that these equations were indeed true. In this sense, workers in the United States were probably fifty years ahead of workers in other parts of the world. There were troublesome times, as workers banded together to make claims for fair pay and reasonable working hours with release from the deplorable conditions prevalent in many industries. Workers' unions were formed to represent workers' claims to industry owners. However, all was not well, and the problems were not solved to a high degree of satisfaction.

Because of this attitude by the mine owners and the differences of opinion with them, Robert, while living in Pennsylvania, somehow became embroiled in the various arguments—or "discussions" as they might be called. One might say that Robert was quite outspoken about the activities of the union, and he learned (via the miner's grapevine) that his name was on the union's do-him-grievous-bodily-harm-or-death list. The forewarning led to Robert's somewhat hasty but timely decision to move west. It was not surprising that Grandfather John followed his brother out west.

John worked his way as a miner through Colorado to the then-thriving town (now the ghost town) of Carbon, Wyoming. The town was so named (the French charbon means coal) because of the coal mining activities in the area.

There wasn't much in the area (now called Carbon County) in 1868 other than a small number of trappers and Native Americans, who were often hostile. Then coal was found north of Elk Mountain, and Thomas Wardell of Bevier, Missouri, brought a crew of miners from his coal properties in Missouri. Wardell leased Union Pacific lands at Carbon for a period of fifteen years. He contracted to sell coal for six dollars per ton for the first two years, five dollars a ton for the next three, four dollars per ton for the next four, and three dollars a ton for the next six years. Wardell was joined in this venture by Michael Quealy, William Hinton, and other unknown associates under the company name of Wyoming Coal & Mining Company, but the Union Pacific Railway's coal department took charge in 1874.

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Excerpted from Fork-Tail Devil by James G. Speight. Copyright © 2015 James G. Speight. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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