"The Eyrie," October 1923

There are only a few letters in the October 1923 issue of Weird Tales, but some are long. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) wrote again for the second time in two months. There are three excerpts from his long letter in this issue, including his first verse published in Weird Tales. Letter writers were:

• An Old Fashioned Woman of Hayward, California, a discerning reader with a good memory who noticed the similarity of:

"The Invisible Terror" by Hugh Thomason (dates unknown) in Weird Tales, June 1923, to "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), which was reprinted in Weird Tales in September 1923;

"The Gray Death" by Loual B. Sugarman (1894-1965) in Weird Tales, June 1923, to "The Silver Menace" by Murray Leinster (1896-1975) in The Thrill Book, September 1 and September 15, 1919; and

"Penelope" by Vincent Starrett (1886-1974) in Weird Tales, May 1923, to "Phoebe" by O. Henry (1862-1910) in Everybody's Magazine, November 1907.

• J. L. of Jersey City, New Jersey.

• Richard P. "Dick" Tooker (1902-1988) of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who, like Lovecraft, had his second letter in two months and would have more--plus a short story--in future issues.

• Joel Shoemaker (1862-1937) of Seattle, Washington. Called "Reverend," he was an Indian fighter, newspaperman, politician, public speaker, and conservationist. A month after his letter was published, Shoemaker got into a tussle with Morris S. Brown, Seattle's "tallest policeman," who was trying to kidnap Shoemaker's three-year-old grandson, Billings Brown. Shoemaker's daughter, Mrs. Nannie S. Brown, fired a pistol at her ex-husband, while Joel Shoemaker "belabored his victim with an old hickory cane he has carried for 30 or 40 years." Brown should have known better than to mess with an old Kentuckian carrying a hickory cane, or with that old Kentuckian's wife, Luella Billings Shoemaker, who "rushed" the pistol to her daughter, ready for the firing. You can read all about it in "Brown Facing Prison Term" in the Seattle Star, November 28, 1923, page 3.

• Lee Torpie of San Francisco, California.

• Dr. Henry C. Murphy (1862-1932) of Brooklyn, New York. He was a long-practicing medical doctor whose father was also a medical doctor. In response to his letter, editor Edwin M. Baird wrote:

The foregoing was written by Dr. Henry C. Murphy of Brooklyn; and, before we comment upon it, we rise to remark that WEIRD TALES seems to offer a special appeal to physicians and surgeons. They like to read our sort of stories, and they like to write 'em. There is scarcely a day that we don't get at least one weird story written by a doctor. Doctors, it seems, encounter some weird adventures.

I have written before about medical doctors. Very often, my writing about doctors has gone along with my writing about psychopaths and serial killers. Click on the menu items on the right to read more.

• H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who wrote a long letter and excerpted two of his own poems therein.

H.P. Lovecraft started out the year 1923 with the publication of his serialized novelette "The Lurking Fear" in the magazine Home Brew. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists nine issues of Home Brew, five published in 1922 and four in 1923. "The Lurking Fear" ran in all four of the issues for 1923, from January through April.

I wondered the other day whether "Dagon" was Lovecraft's first illustrated story in a national magazine. I guess it depends on what you think of as a national magazine, but "The Lurking Fear" in Home Brew was also illustrated, by Clark Ashton Smith of all people.

Home Brew was edited and published in New York by George Julian Houtain (1884-1945) and his second wife, Elsie Dorothy (Grant) McLaughlin Houtain (1889-?). They were members of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA), and she served as the second female president of the organization. I have always thought of Home Brew as an amateur publication and, as such, not a national magazine. On the other hand, "America's Zippiest Pocket Magazine" was available as far west as Cincinnati.

I have read a reference to Home Brew that it was discontinued in 1924. Lovecraft was published in its pages in 1922-1923. Weird Tales must have come along at just the right time for him. "The Lurking Fear," by the way, was reprinted in Weird Tales in June 1928.

Note the blurb on the cover regarding CAS: "the Artist Who Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe."

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, October 1923

The October 1923 issue of Weird Tales has fourteen stories, three features, and five uncredited non-fiction fillers. The features are "The Eyrie," "The Cauldron," and "Weird Crimes." The cover story is the first part of a two-part serial called "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield. The cover art was by R.M. Mally and all of the interior illustrations by William F. Heitman. Firsts include the first stories in Weird Tales by Seabury Quinn, H.P. Lovecraft, and Frank Owen, also the first installment of the feature "Weird Crimes" by Quinn.

• "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton," part one of a two-part serial by Effie W. Fifield (1857-1937).

• "Aged Man Kills Wife, Self and 'Other Woman'," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "World Ice to Wipe Out Continents," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "The Phantom Farmhouse" by Seabury Quinn (1889-1969). This was Quinn's first story in Weird Tales. He would go on to write more stories and other pieces in Weird Tales than any other author.

• "Sight Without Eyes," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "Genoese Riviera Damaged by Waterspout," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "Dagon" by H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). I recently wrote about this story, Lovecraft's first in "The Unique Magazine," and wondered whether William F. Heitman's drawing was the first published illustration of a story by Lovecraft.

• "The Man Who Owned the World" by Frank Owen (1893-1968). This was Frank Owen's first story for Weird Tales. The title is of course in the now familiar form of "The Man Who . . .".

• "Grey Sleep" by Charles Horn (dates unknown).

• "The People of the Comet," part two of a two-part serial by Austin Hall (1880-1933), a native Californian.

• "The Sign from Heaven" by A. Havdal (dates unknown).

• "The Inn of Dread" by Arthur Edwards Chapman (1898-?).

• "The Hairy Monster" by Neil C. Miller (1898-1975) of Sioux City, Iowa.

• "Devil Manor" by E. B. Jordan (dates unknown).

• "The Case of the Golden Lily" by an Irish-Welsh-English author, Francis D. Grierson (1888-1972). Known for his mystery, crime, and detective stories, Grierson wrote in "The Case of the Golden Lily" of his series character Paul Pry.

• "Bluebeard" by Seabury Quinn, the first in a non-fiction series called "Weird Crimes."

• "Weird Snake Dance of Hopis May Be Tabooed," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940). "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimesnion" is an alien invasion story. It appears to have been influenced by Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott (1884), also by recent developments in Einsteinian physics. Wright's aliens are depicted (see below) as small and with pointed ears, not very much different from the so-called gray aliens of today. That makes me think that gray aliens are really just an iteration of the elves, brownies, and other little people of European folklore. Of course I'm not the first person to think that way. Reprinted in The Moon Terror in 1927.

• "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). This was the second reprint of a story by Poe in Weird Tales.

• "After the Storm" by Sarah Harbine Weaver (1880-1965), a writer of Ohio, New York, and California.

• "The Cauldron," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962) in its last installment in the magazine.

• "The Eyrie."

Weird Tales, October 1923, with a cover story, "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield and cover art by R.M. Mally.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Seven

Photographs & Misconceptions

There have been misconceptions and inaccurate pieces of information about Gertrude Barrows Bennett for a very long time now. Our use of the Internet was supposed to have taken care of these things. Instead, bad information spreads like wildfire, while the facts lag far behind. Maybe facts--and ultimately truth--are analog rather than digital.

Birth Year
I'll start with her birth year. It was 1883, not 1884. The Minnesota state census of 1885 made that clear. Wikipedia is wrong.

Middle Name
Next is her middle name. Some people think it was Mabel, and some Myrtle. I used Mabel for a while, but that was based only on what others had written before me. I haven't found any record showing her actual middle name. For all we know, it could have been Minnesota, the place of her birth.

There is this, though: in looking for Mabel Barrows in Minnesota, I came up empty, except for several articles about an actress and stage director named Mabel Hay Barrows (1873-1931). But in looking for Myrtle Barrows, I found two articles mentioning a girl at just the right age and in just the right place for her to have been our subject:

In the 1890s and into the early 1900s, the Minneapolis Journal had a feature called "Journal Juniors." The idea, I think, was for young readers to submit their drawings and essays to the newspaper in hopes of winning prizes. On May 16, 1896, the Journal announced the winners of a drawing contest. Young Myrtle Barrows won honorable mention. Her drawing was not shown. We should note here that Gertrude Barrows had wanted to become an artist but was forced to go to work as a stenographer in order to support her mother following the death of her father and her two brothers. On June 5, 1896, "Journal Juniors" listed the winners of an essay contest on "The History of a Patched Garment." Myrtle Barrows of 1005 University avenue SE, a pupil at Marcy school, won third place in that contest. Gertrude Barrows was of course a writer. If she was a writer in adulthood, why not also in childhood? Anyway, later that year, at Christmastime, Gertrude Barrows' brother, Reginald Barrows, shot himself, and so any happy times in the Barrows family may have come to an end, at least for a while.

So was the Myrtle Barrows of that spring season in 1896 simply Gertrude Barrows, then aged twelve, going by her middle name? It all seems to fit, but I can't say for sure. By the way, the band Marcy Playground is named after Marcy school.

Parents' Death Dates
Gertrude Barrows' father, Charles A. Barrows, died in 1892, not at around the time of World War I. It was her mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows, who died at that time, on August 10, 1918, to be exact.

First Husband's Name
Gertrude's first husband was named Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett, sometimes C.M. Stuart Bennett or just Stuart Bennett. His name was not Stewart Bennett. Once again, Wikipedia is wrong.

Lovecraft & Merritt
Augustus T. Swift was not H.P. Lovecraft writing under a pseudonym. He was actually his own person. People have claimed that Gertrude Barrows, writing under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, was an influence upon both Lovecraft and A. Merritt or that they were admirers of her work. I haven't seen any evidence of that. I wouldn't say that there isn't any evidence. It's just that I haven't seen it. I kind of doubt that anybody has. In his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach wrote: "Gertrude Bennett, by the way, was an admirer of A. Merritt." (Dover, 2014, p. 15.) So maybe the admiration went the other way around, at least at first.

Religion
Gertrude Barrows Bennett was almost certainly a Christian. There is strong evidence in her work for such a conclusion, especially in "Serapion" and "The Citadel of Fear." That she was a Roman Catholic, as I have speculated, is far less certain. Two of her heroes, Terence "Terry" Trenmore in "The Heads of Cerberus" and Colin O'Hara in "The Citadel of Fear," are Irish Catholics. That's about all of the evidence that I have for my speculation. In any case, it's clear that she was not a nihilist. In fact, she made a nihilist, Archer Kennedy, her human villain in "The Citadel of Fear," one of her most powerful and insightful works. Kennedy shouts, "I worship nothing! Do you understand me? Nothing!" If Gertrude Barrows Bennett was a nihilist, why ever would she have made one of her worst villains a person of that idiotic creed? 

Gertrude's maternal grandparents, Charles Hatch (1808-1850) and Clymene (or Clymena) Rebecca (Pierson) Hatch (1813-1899), came out of the "burned-over district" of central and western New York State during the Second Great Awakening in America. Charles Hatch was an abolitionist. Abolitionism in America was, to be sure, a Christian movement. I don't know anything about the religion of Gertrude Barrows' parents, but the body of her mother, Caroline, was cremated and interred at what is now Chelten Hills Cemetery in Philadelphia. I take that as evidence that she was not Catholic, but then I never thought that she was. More likely, she and her husband were Protestants, possibly in a mainstream denomination, but then again, maybe not.

Finally, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's only child, Josephine Christy Bennett, later Constance B. "Connie" Wilson Osborne (1910-2001), was a member of Self-Realization Fellowship in California, World Unity-England, and Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) of Virginia Beach, Virginia. I can't say that these are religious institutions, but they are or may be, in one way or another, associated with religious or spiritual belief systems. So maybe there was searching in the Hatch and Barrows and Bennett families, a kind of treasure-hunting that led them from one end of the country to the other. Constance Bennett remained in her native state, Pennsylvania. Gertrude Barrows Bennett, on the other hand, finally made it to California, the Golden State, that land of milk and honey, finally completing the journey that her grandfather had begun fourscore years before her, a journey that came to grief near the banks of a lonely Wyoming river.

* * *

There are things that are factual and things that are not factual. Nonfactual things can be lies, but they may also be merely inaccurate or incorrect. The Internet is full of nonfactual things. We all saw that for ourselves the other day when American and European media unquestioningly repeated a horrific lie--a kind of blood libel--regarding the murder in Gaza of hundreds of people by a bunch of terrorists, their coreligionists. Even the next day, even when the whole world knew better, National Public Radio (NPR), which is basically a fount of lies, by commission and omission, was calling it a "bombing." There was no bombing. Those poor people were killed by an errant rocket meant to murder Jews. NPR and everyone else who repeated and peddled that lie ought to be ashamed of themselves. But we live in world without shame, embarrassment, remorse, or regret, and so the whole lot of them go blithely on . . . on to the next lie. Gaza, by the way, is from a Hebrew word. Tell us all again who was there first.

So there is the factual versus the nonfactual. Then there are opinions and interpretations. A person can say (as Wikipedia does) that Gertrude Barrows Bennett "has been credited as having 'the best claim at creating the new genre of dark fantasy'." It's not factual to say that she created so-called "dark fantasy." It's also not nonfactual. It's really just an opinion or an interpretation. I think it's actually a misreading and misinterpretation of her work, but that's my opinion. But I can also say that that specific claim, originally made by Gary Hoppenstand, is internally contradictory, to wit: in his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), Dr. Hoppenstand wrote:

Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction in its prediction (directly or indirectly) of a terrible end to our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance. (p. xxiv)

If dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction, and Francis Stevens did not write nihilistic fiction, then Francis Stevens did not invent dark fantasy. QED. Beyond that, as I've already pointed out and as everybody ought to know by now, dark fantasy was not named until late in the twentieth century, it has not been adequately defined by anybody, and there isn't any wide acceptance of any particular definition of that term, or even whether there is such a thing. For example, the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction doesn't even have an entry on this supposed genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction. Although, in his definition, Dr. Hoppenstand echoed H.P. Lovecraft in "The Call of Cthulhu"--"our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance"--I would say that it's more likely that he, Gary Hoppenstand, invented dark fantasy, and not anybody else, least of all Francis Stevens. He, after all, has defined it and described it. It's his genre. Or sub-genre. Or sub-sub-genre. We should note that Dr. Hoppenstand dedicated his book to Karl Edward Wagner, one of the namers and I guess practitioners of what is called "dark fantasy." Wagner was a nihilist. The other namer of dark fantasy, Robert M. Price, is an atheist. I don't know where Dr. Hoppenstand stands.

Anyway, all of this looks to me like an exercise in resume-building, with the resume-builder trying to get all of the rest of us to go along with his own interpretations. On top of that, I would call it a pretty bad misreading and misinterpretation of Francis Stevens' fiction, misreading or misinterpretation being perhaps the first sin of the literary critic. And I would say that Dr. Hoppenstand's introduction as published should never have gotten by his editor, so the University of Nebraska Press is also at fault. I suspect that his introduction was never peer-reviewed, as papers are in the sciences. (Even the sciences are a wreck these days.) But I guess that if you're a professor in the liberal arts, your expectation is that you can put out anything you want and people will go for it because, being an academic, you're "an expert" in your field.* Or at least the people at Wikipedia will go for it. But at least Dr. Hoppenstand did the good work of assembling Francis Steven's stories and at least the University of Nebraska Press issued them in an affordable edition. We should be thankful to both of them for that.

-----

*As people say, full disclosure: I'm a graduate in the liberal arts, too.

* * *

The nonfactual claims about Francis Stevens keep rolling in. There are more regarding her photographic image, if there actually is one in existence:

This is NOT Gertrude Barrows Bennett. This is actually a photograph of Joy Bright Hancock (1898-1986), taken in February 1918, coincidentally in the same year that Gertrude's story "Friend Island" was published in The Argosy. Joy Bright Hancock attended school in Philadelphia. During World War I, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a Yeoman (F), (F) for female. This picture has appeared on the Internet in association with "Friend Island," I guess because it shows a woman in the navy.

This is NOT Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Instead it's a picture of the American movie actress Gertrude Bennett (1899-1985). A different picture of her appears on the front cover of a "book" published in 2020. The subtitle of that book repeats the misconception that Francis Stevens invented "dark fantasy." I have altered this image from the original that I found on the Internet.

Here's another image of the actress Gertrude Bennett, this one on a cigarette card.

On October 7, 2023, Kevin L. Cook left a long and very informative comment on this blog under the second part of this series on Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Mr. Cook wrote: "First, the two common published photographs of Mrs. Bennett were supplied by her daughter, Constance Osbourne, to Robert Weinberg in 1988." Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what two photographs he was referring to. I can only assume that they are the ones shown above and below. You can find both on the Internet. As far as I can tell, none of the sources of these images gives an original source or provenance for them. So are they of Gertrude Barrows Bennett? I don't know. You'd think we would know for sure. And you'd think that we would have better, larger, and higher-quality images than those shown here. But we don't. So I will remain skeptical until someone can come up with some good supporting evidence. Whoever has Robert Weinberg's papers is a place to start. A member of Gertrude's or Constance's family would be another.

In any case, the image above is obviously older than the one below. I base this on the dress. They may or may not be of the same woman. It's hard to tell. If the image above is of Gertrude Barrows, I would guess that it's a graduation picture, possibly from around 1900 or 1901. Unfortunately, we don't know where she went to high school, nor whether she went to some kind of business school. Either way, it would almost certainly have been in Minneapolis.

Here is the image that appears on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. The source is a Russian website. So why do Russians have the better or more likely image of Francis Stevens? Don't ask me. This world is full of mysteries. Anyway, judging from the dress, especially the hat, I would guess that this picture was taken as early as the World War I years, possibly in the 1920s, and possibly as late as about 1930. If this is Francis Stevens, is she looking to the west? Towards California and the place in the Lower Forty-Eight where you can watch the sun set over the encircling sea?

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Six

Conclusion

Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910) was supposed to have been a writer for magazines. Maybe a shared interest in writing is how he and Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) met. I have looked for his name in The FictionMags Index and have come up empty. I have also looked for different versions of his name and found an author named Charles Stuart who wrote several stories published in British story magazines in 1910-1911. Was he our man? Who can say?

Gertrude M. Barrows wrote a story under her own name published in 1904. As far as anyone knows, she did not have another of her stories published until 1917, and then only under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. Could she have collaborated with her husband in the time in between? Or if he was an author of stories for magazines, could she have actually been his ghostwriter?

In his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach wrote: "He [C.M. Stuart Bennett] had been a newspaper reporter, a fact which probably led his widow to contribute feature articles to the newspaper" (Dover, 2014, p. 14). What newspaper? And if she wrote feature articles for newspapers, is that how she could have met A. Merritt (1884-1943), who worked as a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Sunday Supplement and/or The Sunday American Magazine, forerunner to The American Weekly, of which he was later the editor? Again, who can say?

Speculations . . .

* * *

One of the themes in the fiction of Francis Stevens is that of old gods returning to earth after having been banished for many centuries, if not millennia. Her stories with this theme and the gods in them are:

• Nacoc-Yaotl in "The Citadel of Fear" (The Argosy, September 14-October 26, 1918)

• The scarlet archangel in "Claimed" (The Argosy, March 6-March 20, 1920)

• Serapion in "Serapion" (The Argosy, June 19-July 10, 1920)

These are dark gods, but they do not triumph in the end. For them to have triumphed would have been uncharacteristic of Francis Stevens, whom I feel certain did not work in the ill-defined, late-twentieth-century sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. If you're looking for a triumphant old god, see Cthulhu in Strange Eons by Robert Bloch (1978). By the way, The Exorcist (1973), fifty years old this year, also involves the theme of the return of an old god, in this case the ancient Mesopotamian deity Pazuzu. Both "Serapion" and The Exorcist are about demonic possession.

* * *

Other motifs and recurring themes and settings in the work of Francis Stevens are those of treasure hunting, shipwrecks, and islands. Francis Stevens' stories in that vein include:

• "The Nightmare" (All-Story Weekly, April 14, 1917)

• "Friend Island" (All-Story Weekly, September 7, 1918)

• "The Citadel of Fear" (The Argosy, September 14-October 26, 1918)

• "Avalon" (The Argosy, August 16 to September 6, 1919)

• "Claimed" (The Argosy, March 6-March 20, 1920)

• "Sunfire" (Weird Tales, July-September 1923)

In "Friend Island," there is an Ancient Mariness who tells her tale and about her relationship with the eponymous island, which is actually a living being. I wonder if Gertrude Barrows Bennett could have known one of her husband's other wives, Marie La Ton (ca. 1886-?), who was a boat pilot and went with C.M. Stuart Bennett on one of his treasure hunting expeditions to the Carolina coast. If the Ancient Mariness was based on Marie La Ton, then maybe she comes by her feelings about men naturally, as Bennett seems to have been a real scoundrel, specifically when it came to women.

There is a group of treasure hunters in "Sunfire," Francis Stevens' only story in Weird Tales. Here I wonder if one of them could have been a portrait of her drowned husband. There would have been precedent for such a thing in fantasy and science fiction: I think of Victor Frankenstein as having been based in part on the authoress' husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). He drowned, too, by the way, probably also by misadventure.

* * *

I first wrote about Francis Stevens on March 10, 2015. In that posting, I listed her stories, the titles of the magazines in which they were published, and their dates of publication. Her career as a published author lasted a scant six and a half years, from 1917 to 1923, with a prior story having been published in 1904. This is the 100th anniversary year of the close of her career, which came when she was just forty years old. Francis Stevens' stories were rediscovered in the 1940s, though, and were reprinted during that decade, from January 1940 to November 1949 and as late as September 1950, in various pulp magazines. A. Merritt is supposed to have had a hand in that. The last two reprints were posthumous.

The writer behind the pseudonym, Gertrude Barrows Bennett Gaster, last wrote to her daughter, Constance Bennett Wilson, on September 1, 1939, coincidentally the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thus setting off World War II. Thus also, Francis Stevens' stories were first published during World War I and in its aftermath, then published again during World War II and in its aftermath.

Gertrude Gaster lived in California during the 1940s, all or most of that time in San Francisco. If she was paid for her work, then payments would presumably have gone to her at her home in the Golden State. Would any payments made after her death, which came on February 2, 1948, have gone to her husband, Carl F. Gaster? Or to her daughter?

More speculations.

It appears that in writing his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach was in contact with Constance, whom he called "Connie," quotation marks included. The whereabouts of Gertrude Gaster were then unknown, and only Connie could have told him the details of her mother's writing habits or about where and how they had lived in her childhood. Eshbach wrote that the stories of Francis Stevens have "a strong leaning toward the mysterious" (Dover, 2014, p. 13). She seems to have had the same kinds of leanings in her own life, for why ever would she have remained out of contact with her daughter for her last nine years on this earth? Did Constance see that her mother's stories were once again in print during the 1940s? Could she have tracked down Gertrude by going to the editors or publishers of the magazines that did the reprinting? And did Gertrude herself see that her stories were once again in print? Then in her fifties and sixties, could she have taken some final pride and satisfaction in that?

A last coincidence: Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's introduction to The Heads of Cerberus was dated February 1952, the same month in which Gertrude's widower, Carl F. Gaster, was found dead in his home on the other side of the country, in Portland, Oregon.

* * *

I have one more part in this series, inspired by a comment from a couple of weeks ago made by one of the readers of this blog.

* * *

Francis Stevens' Story in Weird Tales
"Sunfire" (two-part serial, July/August-September 1923)

Further Reading

• "Introduction" to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, introduction by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. I have the Dover edition from 2014.

• "The Woman Who Wrote 'Citadel of Fear'" by Sam Moskowitz, his introduction to The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (Paperback Library, 1970).

• The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens, edited and with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand (2004).

• "Navigating the Weird Mind of Gertrude Barrows Bennett--the Mother of Dark Fantasy (pt. 1)" by Taylor, on the website Fandomentals, March 19, 2020, at the following URL:

https://www.thefandomentals.com/gertrude-barrows-bennett-1/

Taylor's title repeats what I see as a misreading and misinterpretation of Francis Stevens as the inventor of what is called dark fantasy.

• "Fantascienza, un genere (femminile). Gertrude Barrows Bennett, alias Francis Stevens" by Laura Coci, on the website Vitaminevaganti, December 5, 2020, at the following URL:

https://vitaminevaganti-com.translate.goog/2020/12/05/fantascienza-un-genere-femminile-gertrude-barrows-bennett-alias-francis-stevens/?_x_tr_sl=it&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

• There are other websites and blogs that discuss Francis Stevens, some of which are Italian. It looks as though she and her works are of special interest to Italian fans and researchers. 

"The Funeral of Shelley" by Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Five

Second Husband

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett's second husband was Carl Franklin Gaster (1892-1952). He was born on November 7, 1892, in San Luis Obispo, California, to George Reed Gaster (1857-1916) and Rachel Isabel (Packwood) Gaster (1857-1927). Carl F. Gaster grew up on his parents' farm in Santa Barbara County, California. In 1900, he was in San Francisco with his parents, then, in 1910, in the household of his aunt, Eliza Scott. At age twenty-seven, Gaster had already been married and divorced.

Rather than write a narrative about Gaster's life and career, I'll just give some bullet points:

• In 1911, in Vallejo, California, Gaster stole from a man in an adjoining hotel room. He was arrested and put on probation.

• In 1917, he was a locomotive inspector with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

• In 1917, Gaster lived in San Francisco with his wife, Minnie Gaster.

• On November 21, 1919, Gaster applied for a seaman's certificate with the U.S. Department of Commerce. He had by then graduated from the U.S. Shipping Board Marine Engineering School.

• In 1920, Gaster lived in San Francisco and worked as a marine wiper. Once again, he was divorced.

• In March 1927, Gaster was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, for drunken larceny and illegal possession: he had stolen some bedding from a hotel while drunk.

• Gaster was otherwise employed from June 22, 1921, to July 5, 1927, as a 3rd assistant engineer, 2nd assistant engineer, and junior engineer aboard various oceangoing vessels.

• On March 27, 1930, Gaster was enumerated in the U.S. Census of merchant seamen. He was occupied as a 4th assistant engineer and based at Bayonne, New Jersey. His unnamed wife was in Merced, California. Twelve days later, on April 8, 1930, Gertrude Bennett, widowed, was enumerated in Mill Valley, California, where she was working at a trucking (?) company. So it looks like the two had not yet married.

• In 1933, Carl F. Gaster and his wife Gertrude were living in San Francisco, thus they must have married in the period 1930-1933. In 1933, Gertrude Barrows Bennett Gaster turned fifty years old. Her new husband turned forty-one that year.

• On June 12, 1938, Gaster wrote to U.S. Local Inspector of Boilers in San Pedro, California, requesting a record of his sea service. He explained that he needed that record in order to apply for a civil service job. He wrote with a return address of 642 9th Avenue, Prospect Park, Pennsylvania. Two years later, on April 16, 1940, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's daughter, then going by the Christian name of Constance and her married name of Wilson--Constance Wilson--was enumerated at that same address with her husband Walter Wilson and their children. So I wrote the other day stating that Gertrude and her daughter presumably never lived together again after the 1920s, but did they after all? On the other hand, a return address and a residence are not necessarily the same thing. In any case, Gertrude and Constance were presumably still in contact with each other as of June 1938. That same year, Gertrude Gaster was listed in the Sacramento, California, city directory, working in that city as a stenographer. According to Lloyd Arthur Eshbach in his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, she wrote a final letter to her daughter from California on September 1, 1939, promising a longer one. It was either never written, never sent, or never arrived. I have not found either Gertrude Gaster or her husband in the census of 1940. She was very near to disappearing from the earth.

• On September 10, 1940, Carl Gaster arrived in New Orleans from Aruba, Dutch West Indies. He was then working as a machinist on board the Esso Bayway.

• In 1942, Gaster was in U.S. Army Transport (U.S.A.T.) Service at Fort Mason in San Francisco, afterwards with the Hawaiian Dredging Company in Honolulu, Hawaii. His wife was Gertrude Gaster, who had an address of 1351 Ellis Street, San Francisco.

• On November 21, 1944, Gaster arrived in Los Angeles from Honolulu on board the Makiki.

• From February to May 1947, Gaster appears to have made a trip by sea from Honolulu to Shanghai and back.

• Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett Gaster died on February 2, 1948, in San Francisco. It looks like she was Gaster's fourth wife.

• In 1952, Gaster worked as a Merchant Marine fireman.

Finally, on February 26, 1952, the body of Carl Franklin Gaster was found at 216 NW 3rd Avenue, in Portland, Oregon. He was fifty-nine years old at his death. He had a blood alcohol level of 0.13. A complete autopsy also found that there was "[m]arked coronary arteriosclerosis." However, no cause of death was found. There is also no indication of how long his body may have lain undiscovered. Both he and his wife died in the same month of the year, in February, and so he followed her to the grave shortly after the anniversary of her death.

Carl F. Gaster was buried at Greenwood Hills Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.

To be continued . . .

A photograph and physical description of Carl Franklin Gaster, from his application for seaman's certificate, November 21, 1919. Out of all of the principals in the life of Gertrude Barrows Bennett--herself, her parents, her brothers, her first husband Charles M. Stuart Bennett, her daughter--only Gaster is represented on the Internet with a photographic image.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Four

First Husband

Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) was married twice, first to Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910), then to Carl Franklin Gaster (1892-1952). She probably met her first husband on the East Coast and her second on the West. Her first drowned near Key West, Florida. Her second lies at rest on almost the exact opposite end of the country, in Portland, Oregon. It looks like liquid played a part in his death as well.

Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett was born in the period April-May-June 1874 in West Derby, Lancashire, England. His parents were Henry Mellor Bennett (1847-1938), an ironfounder like his father before him, and Catherine "Kate" (Stuart) Bennett (1850-1922). Both lived and died in England. Whether they ever came to America is open to question.

C.M. Stuart Bennett arrived in the United States possibly in the 1890s or about 1896. On October 6, 1897, he married Madeline A. Hobson (1872-1961) in Bristol, Virginia. According to a contemporaneous newspaper article, "The groom came to Bristol a few months ago with his parents, who recently completed a tour around the world." That article continued: "Mr. Bennett is a young man who has seen much of the world, but whose habits and manners are still those of the genial Englishman." The couple was to live in a newly purchased home in nearby Paperville, Tennessee. (Chattanooga Daily Times, Oct. 8, 1897, p. 3.) They had two daughters, Catherine "Kate" (Bennett) Burton Bachman (1898-1984) and Helen Marguerite (Bennett) Biden (1900-1988). I can't help but see omens in that newspaper article from 1897.

I haven't found the young Bennett family in the U.S. Census of 1900, but it's clear that their marriage didn't last long, for on August 3, 1904, Bennett married Luella Wilson Stewart (1881-1965), daughter of Sylvester Noble Stewart and Nannie (Wilson) Stewart (then deceased), at the Madison Avenue (Dutch) Reformed Church in New York City. ("Married" in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 7, 1904, p. 13.) By 1910, the couple were divorced.

Bennett's marriages kept coming. There are three more to go.

According to her friend, Emma Diffenderfer, Marie La Ton or Laton (ca. 1886-?) of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Manhattan married Charles M. Stuart Bennett in about 1909. Presumably that was in New York or New Jersey. Marie La Ton was supposed to have been the first woman to take out a boat pilot's license or skipper's license in Philadelphia. In 1909, she piloted a boat for her husband, then or later called "Captain," on a treasure-hunting expedition off the Carolina coast. That effort came to grief, and Marie returned to New York City, promising her stepmother that she would never again attempt such a thing. ("Manicurist Says That Laton [sic] Girl Had Given Up Search" in the Press of Atlantic City, Dec. 29, 1910, p. 1+.) On April 18, 1910, Marie La Ton was enumerated in the U.S. Census at 19 East Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan. She was the proprietress of a restaurant, the name of which we know by a later newspaper article was Dixie Kitchens. She was divorced at the time. A month later, on May 12, 1910, C.M. Stuart Bennett became a father again with the birth of his daughter, called Josephine Christy Bennett (1910-2001). The newborn's mother was Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett, whom Bennett had married in New Jersey in 1908. I guess that means that if he and Marie La Ton really were married in about 1909, he was a bigamist. Either that or he and Gertrude had divorced by the time he and Marie were married, and Josephine, later called Constance, was born out of wedlock. Or maybe the year 1908 is in error. Or maybe they were married twice and divorced once. Or twice.

It sure looks like Charles M. Stuart Bennett was what people called in those days a scoundrel. The name Constance would have been in strong contrast to his habits.

Despite Marie's promise to her stepmother, the treasure hunting continued, and on Christmas night, December 25-26, 1910, it came to an end when C.M. Stuart Bennett, also called Stuart Bennett, was drowned after his 45-foot launch, called the Lebra (referred to in some accounts as the Phra), was wrecked against the west jetty or northwest jetties near Key West, Florida. There were six people all together on the boat. Three were rescued the morning after the wreck, while a fourth, Herman Parker, drifted or swam to a nearby key and was thereby saved (or saved himself). Bennett was the first drowning victim that night. His wife, who clung to a mast of the wrecked boat but after six hours slipped into the water, was the second. Bennett's body was found near the western banks the day after the wreck. Hers was never found. He is supposed to have been buried at Key West city cemetery.

Emma Diffenderfer felt sure that the Mrs. Bennett who was lost was not Marie La Ton, even though she had not seen her in five months. For a time there were reports that it was Bennett's newer wife, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who had drowned. Then, on December 29, 1910, Mrs. Jessie (Newnham) Pillault (1869-1952) of Jacksonville, Florida, came forth with word that it was her daughter, Beatrice Pillault Bennett (1890-presumably 1910), who had drowned. The Bennetts had been married in June without Mrs. Pillault's knowledge and had gone around in Florida by boat before setting off on that fateful voyage. Mrs. Pillault, by the way, was also English and also a proprietress, in her case of an ice cream parlor and/or a small bakery. ("Find Mother of Woman Lost in Key West Wreck" in the Miami News, December 29, 1910, p. 1.)

Christmastime must have been a sad and stressful time of year for Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Her older brother Reginald "Reggie" Barrows (1880-1896) had killed himself on December 23, 1896, in Minneapolis, where the Barrows family were living at the time. (There isn't any mention of her in newspaper accounts of his suicide, but at age thirteen, she must have been at home when the newspaper reporters came around with their terrible news.) And now, in 1910, with her only daughter not even a year old, she learned that her husband, by then obviously a philanderer and possibly a bigamist, had drowned while on a treasure-hunting adventure . . . like her grandfather sixty years before.

Next: The Second Husband.

A map of Key West and the area to the west, presumably the location of the foundering of the Lebra, "Captain" Charles M. Stuart Bennett's boat, on the night of December 25-26, 1910. Look for "West Jetty" in the upper left of this map from 1921.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Three

Family Homes & Daughter Constance

From 1870 to 1934, the enumerators of censuses and the compilers of city directories found Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett, and before her, her family, in different places and recorded a few facts about them: 

• In 1870, her parents, Charles A. Barrows (1841-1898) and Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows (1841-1918), were in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Barrows was employed as a life insurance agent.

• In 1875, her parents and her older brother Clark or Clarke Barrows (1873-1899) were living in Hersey, Minnesota.

• In 1880, the same three members of the Barrows family were in Minneapolis, where Barrows worked as a traveling agent in the business of sashes and doors.

• In 1885, the family was complete with the addition of Reginald "Reggie" Barrows (1880-1896) and Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948). Reginald was recorded as Reynold. The Barrows were then living in Villard, Minnesota. They lived in the same place in 1890 according to the veterans schedules of that year.

• The 1890 census is of course lost, and by the end of that decade there were only two Barrows left, Gertrude and her mother.

• In 1900, Gertrude and her mother were living at 1022 Hawthorn Avenue in Minneapolis, where Caroline Barrows was a solicitor for a publishing house and Gertrude was a student.

• In 1903, Gertrude and her mother were at 3821 Thomas Avenue SW in Minneapolis. Gertrude was working as a stenographer.

• In 1908, Gertrude M. Barrows married Charles M. Stuart Bennett (1874-1910) in New Jersey.

• On April 15, 1910, Gertrude was a lodger at 1700 Vine Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She did not have an occupation.

• On May 12, 1910, while living at the same address, Gertrude gave birth to her only child, a daughter named in her birth certificate as Josephine Christy Bennett but later named Constance Bennett (1910-2001).

• In 1920, Gertrude and her daughter, called Constance, were boarding at 4203 Grand Avenue in Philadelphia. She was an author, in "general practice." She was a published author from 1917 to 1923, also with a story published in 1904. Perhaps her mother had inroads in the publishing business at about that time.

• In 1930, Gertrude was at 193 Bigelow Street in Mill Valley, California. She worked as a secretary at a truck company (or at least that's what I think it says in the census).

• In 1933, Gertrude, by then married to Carl F. Gaster (1892-1952), was at 3870 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, California.

• In 1934, Gertrude was living at 1027 Ellis Street in San Francisco and working as a stenographer.

• On April 17, 1942, Gertrude was living at that same address when her husband filled out his draft card.

• In 1944, Gertrude was at 2166 Sutter Street in San Francisco.

• Gertrude Mabel or Myrtle Barrows Bennett Gaster died on February 2, 1948, in San Francisco at age sixty-four.

* * *

Gertrude Barrows Bennett was married twice and had one daughter. The husbands were Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910) and Carl Franklin Gaster (1892-1952). Gertrude's daughter was Josephine Christy Bennett. I'll write about her first, then come back to the husbands.

Josephine Christy Bennett, later called Constance, was born on May 12, 1910, at 1700 Vine Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father was Charles M. Stuart Bennett, an Englishman and a writer for magazines. He died less than eight months after her birth. I wonder now if the name change could have had something to do with Bennett or his death.

Constance Bennett presumably grew up in a household that included her mother and her grandmother. Her grandmother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows (1841-1918), died on August 10, 1918, in Philadelphia. Constance was then just eight years old. In 1920, Constance Bennett was enumerated in the census with her mother as boarders in the household of Albert and Annie Orloff in Philadelphia. (Annie is mentioned in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's introduction to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, published in 1952 by Polaris Press.) By 1930, Constance was with her first husband in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, while Gertrude was living on the opposite end of the country in Mill Valley, California. As far as anyone knows, they never again lived together. The story is that the daughter lost contact with her mother. That might explain the lack of an extant photograph of Gertrude Barrows Bennett. On the other hand, her only daughter had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, many of whom are still living. Could there yet be a photograph of her somewhere?

Constance Bennett was married twice, first to Walter Llewellyn Wilson, Jr. (1909-1940), then to Edgar Henry Osborne (1906-1977). Like her father, her first husband died by drowning, in his case while bathing in Loyalsock Creek near Williamsport, Pennsylvania. And like her father, her second husband was born in England.

Constance B. Osborne died on April 12, 2001, at Lehigh Valley Hospice in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was ninety years old and was survived by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In other words, Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett, a writer of obscurity, has descendants who are still with us.

By the way, Constance Bennett Osborne was a member of Self-Realization Fellowship in California, World Unity-England, and A.R.E., Virginia Beach, Virginia. Founded in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananda (ca. 1893-1952), Self-Realization Fellowship is still in existence. Also still in existence is A.R.E., or the Association for Research and Enlightenment, founded in 1928 by Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). I'm afraid I don't know what World Unity-England is, but I think we can assume that it was, like the others, an organization from on the fringes.

To be continued . . .

A postcard showing a view of Nicolett Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota, from the early 1900s, perhaps at around the same time that Gertrude M. Barrows was living in that city with her mother.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Two

Family

Towards the end of December 1865, Charles A. Barrows (1841-1898), a veteran of the Civil War, married Caroline "Carrie" Pierson Hatch (1841-1918), originally of Genesee County, New York. They had three children:

1. Clark or Clarke Barrows (1873-1899) was born in 1873 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied biology or zoology at the University of Minnesota and was in the class of 1894. As a student, he was a member of an organization called Investigators and was an assistant in the Minnesota State Zoological Survey. After being sick at home for many months, Clark or Clarke Barrows died of tuberculosis on January 20, 1899, at age twenty-five. The place was his home at 1114 Hawthorne Avenue in Minneapolis. He was buried at Lakewood Cemetery in that city.

2. Reginald "Reggie" Barrows (1880-1896) was born in about the second half of 1880 in Minneapolis. He also died young, before his brother, in fact. Reginald Barrows' death came by suicide, on December 23, 1896, in Minneapolis. He was, in one way or another, mentally ill or mentally disturbed. On December 22, 1896, he checked into a hotel in Minneapolis and stayed for a day and more, taking meals in his room. When questioned by the hotel clerk, Barrows said he did not have any money to pay for his stay. He fled from the hotel and was followed by a bellboy, then by a gathering crowd. Barrows produced a pistol and fired at the crowd. He entered a ramshackle vacant house and refused to come out. Shortly afterwards, Barrows shot himself. Even before being informed of his death by reporters, his mother, Caroline Barrows, told them, "Nothing you could tell me about him would surprise me. Why, I am prepared for anything. It would not surprise me if he was lying dead at my feet." Reginald Barrows was buried at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, a little more than two years before his brother. See: "Tragic! Reginal [sic] Barrows, 16 Years Old, Commits Suicide--The Young Man Was Undoubtedly Insane.--He Was Discharged From His Position Monday" in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 24, 1894, page 1; also, "Crazed! Reginald Barrows Shot Himself through the Heart, [etc.]" in the Minneapolis Daily Times, December 24, 1894, page 1.

3. Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) was born on September 18, 1883, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't know anything about her life before 1904 except that in less than a decade at the close of the nineteenth century, she lost her father, her two brothers, and her grandmother:

• Charles A. Barrows died on May 5, 1892.

• Reginald Barrows died on December 23, 1896.

• Clark or Clarke Barrows died on January 20, 1899.

• Clymene or Clymena Rebecca (Pierson) Hatch died on August 26, 1899.

That left only herself and her mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows (1841-1918).

* * *

The first known published story by Gertrude M. Barrows was "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar," published in The Argosy in March 1904, when she was just twenty years old. Gertrude used only her first and middle initials, writing as G.M. Barrows. After a gap of more than thirteen years, she returned to write under a pseudonym, Francis Stevens, one she would use for the remainder of her career as a published author. That career lasted a scant six and a half years.

Gertrude's first story under the Francis Stevens pen name was "The Nightmare," published in All-Story Weekly on April 14, 1917, just eight days after the United States had declared war on Germany. The story opens on board the RMS Lusitania, which was of course sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, a precipitating event in America's entry into the war. Her next story was "The Labyrinth," a three-part serial that ran in All-Story Weekly from July 27 to August 10, 1918. On the same publication date on which her story concluded, August 10, 1918, Gertrude's mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows (1841-1918), died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at age seventy-eight. That left Gertrude alone, except for her only child.

To be continued . . .

"The Sinking of the Lusitania" by the American artist Charles Hopkinson (1869-1962), used in a poster during World War I and now in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. In her story "The Nightmare," Francis Stevens' protagonist goes into the sea with the sinking of the Lusitania. Fortunately, he survives. Francis Stevens' first husband was not so lucky when his craft was wrecked in 1910. Stay tuned for more on that story.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part One

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett
Aka Francis Stevens
Born September 18, 1883, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Died February 2, 1948, San Francisco, California

Introduction

I first wrote about Gertrude Barrows Bennett on March 10, 2015. I started with a biography and then moved on to a discussion of each of her thirteen published stories. My main purpose was to look into the idea that, writing as Francis Stevens, she was the person who invented dark fantasy. That idea was suspect from the beginning. I found very little if any evidence that she was in fact the inventor of that ill-defined (or undefined), late-twentieth-century sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction. And yet the idea persists. I guess that shows how little influence I have on anything. Anyway, you can begin reading what I wrote about Francis Stevens, aka Gertrude Barrows Bennett, by clicking here. Within that first posting are links to my discussions of each of her stories.

* * *

Eight years is a long time in terms of the Internet. A lot of new-old information has come to light in that time. We now know more about Gertrude Barrows Bennett--about her family, her husbands, and her date and place of death--than we did in 2015. There is a photograph circulating on the Internet that is supposed to be of her. I don't think that it is she. Unless it comes from Randall A. Everts, who has been conducting research on and gathering photographs of tellers of weird tales for more than half a century, I'm not sure that I would trust such a thing very much, at least in regards to an author who has such a very obscure life story.

* * *

Descended from some very old families in America, Gertrude M. Barrows was born on September 18, 1883. (The M. may be for Mabel or Myrtle.) Some sources give her birth year as 1884, and so already there is a question as to the facts of her life. The earliest census in which she was enumerated was the Minnesota state census of 1885. The date was May 1, 1885. The place was Villard, in Pope County, Minnesota, northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul, for that's where she was counted with her parents and her two older brothers. Her age was given as one year. On that date, if she had been born in 1884, Gertrude's age would presumably have been given as "8/12," or age eight months. (H. McDonald, listed on the opposite page of the census, was listed as being "2/12," or two months old. Martha M. Count, listed a few pages before, was "6/12," or six months old, meaning she was born in 1884.) But if she was born in 1883, Gertrude would have been not an infant, her age counted in months, but a one-year-old, awaiting her next birthday, that is, her second birthday. Based on this evidence, I think it has to be 1883. The U.S. census of 1900--other sources, too--had it wrong. Maybe recorders of information were given the wrong information.

Gertrude was the youngest child and only daughter of Charles A. Barrows (1841-1892), son of a Michigan farmer and a private in the 33rd Illinois Infantry from August 21, 1861, to September 1, 1864. That unit served in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas and was at the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, one of the turning points of the war. Barrows was a life insurance agent, a traveling agent for a door and sash company, and a banker, possibly among other things. On March 25, 1892, he was admitted to the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Sawtelle, California, with chronic pulmonary disease. He died less than two months later, on May 5, 1892, and was buried at Los Angeles National Cemetery. He was just fifty-one years old.

Going back to the year in which the Civil War ended, on December 29, 1865, Barrows married Caroline "Carrie" Pierson Hatch (1841-1918) in Cook County, Illinois, presumably in Chicago. An alternative date and place is December 26, 1865, in Will County, Illinois. Her parents were Charles Hatch (1808-1850) and Clymene (or Clymena) Rebecca (Pierson) Hatch (1813-1899), who, as it so happened, were step-siblings. They were married on July 26, 1830, in Oneida County, New York. By 1845, they were living in what is now Waukesha in what was then the Wisconsin Territory. Hatch was an abolitionist, a member of the Racine County Liberty Party, and a candidate to attend the Wisconsin state constitutional convention.

In 1850, Charles Hatch left his family to go on the California Gold Rush. He never made it to California. In a cold, wet, and snowy June in what is now Wyoming, Hatch fell ill. On June 12, 1850, he died, possibly of mountain fever, and was buried along the Big Sandy River near what is now Farson in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. His grave is marked by an old headstone and enclosed by an old wooden fence. The Oregon-California Trails Association has placed a historical plaque at or near his gravesite. (See the website Find A Grave for more information and pictures of the gravesite and plaque.) This would not be the last death by what you might call misadventure in the story of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, nor the last premature death among her family members.

To be continued . . .

A view of the veterans' home at Sawtelle, California, where Charles A. Barrows (1841-1898), father of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, died. He was a Union Army veteran of the Civil War.

Full attribution:

Title: Soldiers' Home [Sawtelle Veterans Home]. Repository: California Historical Society Digital. Object ID: CHS2013.1297. Collection: Views of Los Angeles, California. Photographer: Putnam and Valentine. Date: Undated. Format: Photographic print: b&w; 20 x 25 cm. General notes: Putnam & Valentine was a partnership of J.R. Putnam and W.S. Valentine, stereo photographers active in Los Angeles, circa 1898-1912. Preferred citation: Soldiers' Home, Views of Los Angeles, California, courtesy, California Historical Society, CHS2013.1297.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley