Orcas Pioneers: Bigamist Boone

 By Tom Welch

The Tale of ‘Bigamist Boone’

A very well-respected pioneer family of Doe Bay had many children, among them a daughter named Julia. She was born and raised here on Orcas Island in the late 1800’s, living on a farm, attending school at the little schoolhouse in Olga and later in Eastsound. Julia met a man named William C. Boone, a former army sergeant and a supposed descendant of Daniel Boone. Julia and Boone married and had three children, living on land her father had given them from his homestead at Doe Bay. Boone was an accomplished carpenter who was able to find work in the local area. He also built their home and several outbuildings by himself.

After several years had passed their income was not sufficient to support the family. Selling the farm for $500 in 1903, Boone told Julia that he would locate somewhere on the mainland, with a job or better prospects of some sort, and would send for her and the children. Months passed, and no word came from Boone. Julia and the children were in dire poverty, with not a cent coming from Boone for their support. Julia was forced to move to Maple Falls in Whatcom County, where she found a housekeeping job to support her family.

Julia’s brothers, among them the twins Albert and Barney, had not taken to Boone as their sister had. In fact, they didn’t like him. Suspecting that he had absconded with the money from the sale of the farm, her brothers were intent on tracking him down and getting satisfaction for their wronged sister. Children of a stern German father and a full-blood Tsimshian mother, Boone learned that the Viericks were the wrong people to cross in such a manner.

In Salem, Oregon, on September 15, 1906, William C. Boone married 70 year old Caroline S. McFadden, a wealthy widow. McFadden owned a farm in the rich lands of the Willamette Valley, a place worth a tidy sum. Boone, now in his third simultaneous marriage, (he had left a wife in Ohio before he married Julia Vierick), was coming up in the world. Enter the Vierick brothers, with the local sheriff in tow. Having succeeded in locating Boone after a long search, the brothers had no intention of seeing him get away with what they considered his criminal treatment of their sister and his children.

Boone was arrested on $400 bail and bound over for trial on the circuit court for bigamy. Julia Boone was granted a divorce by a court in Bellingham. Mired in poverty caused by their father’s desertion of the family, the children had been sent to the Indian School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, because their mother had been unable to care for them. It was there at the Indian School that one of the Vierick boys made a friend he remained close to all his life – Jim Thorpe.

After Boone’s arrest more information on his background came out. In addition to his several marriages, each without benefit of divorce from the previous marriage, it was determined that his name was really D.M. Richards. Posterity, however, will always call him “Bigamist Boone.”