C. Jill Grady

Remittance Men and the Character of Cannon Beach

ON JULY 21, 1885, the Daily Astorian reported this local news:

Frederick Logan and Joseph Walsh, ranchmen at Seaside, Clatsop, arrived in town on Saturday. They came via Tillamook and Forest Grove, making the trip in three and a half days. They represent the journey as a pleasant one, although the trails had to be opened at several points. These gentlemen are en route to the Kootenai country where they propose to establish a stock ranch on an extensive scale.

The Kootenay country and other places in British Columbia such as Victoria and Walhacin and Cannington Manor in Saskatchewan were being promoted for development by British emigrants. William Adolph Baillie–Grohman, a wealthy Englishman, envisioned transforming the East Kootenay bottom-land into an agricultural paradise, settled exclusively by and for refined British gentlemen.¹ Herbert Frederick Logan and Joseph Walsh were two such gentlemen, part of a group of young British bachelors living in the United States and Canada as "remittance men." All had arrived in North America with some British pounds to invest and hopes and dreams of achieving financial success.

In the end, Logan and Walsh chose not to settle in Canada. Instead, they returned to the Oregon coast to pursue opportunities in the fledgling destination resort of Seaside and its environs. The two men homesteaded and developed the south side of Tillamook Head, then known as Elk Creek and now named Cannon Beach. Logan, Walsh, and other British remittance men cleared and surveyed most of the nine-mile beach. They homesteaded there, built their own cottages, and then built cottages for their neighbors. Logan organized the Elk Creek Road Company in 1890 with a group of Seaside businessmen. He provided most of the money necessary to build the first wagon road from Seaside over Tillamook Head and operated it as a toll road. On his 158-acre homestead, which spanned Elk Creek (now Ecola Creek), near where the bridge stands today, he constructed and operated the second resort hotel in Cannon Beach.²

The Griffin family's first house, shown here in the 1890s, was located at Arcadia Beach, north of the homestead of Joe Walsh, one of Cannon Beach's remittance men.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos courtesy of Cannon Beach Historical Society

John Delbert Griffin, in Reflections on Early Cannon Beach, writes that "a number of bachelors had come over from England and were known as remittance men."³ "Remittance" refers to the financial support some British men received while living away from home, either as an advanced lump sum of money to help them relocate and settle in the United States or through regular deposits of British pounds into a local bank.⁴ According to historian Lee Olson:

The thing that they all had in common was that they had family money to help them seek their fortunes. It may have come as a lump settlement; more often it came as a check or money draft — a periodic remittance on a monthly, semiannual, or annual schedule. And there were instances when a young man got money by writing home in desperate need. The latter case was frequent when a young man found he was pathetically mismatched against the harsh land he had chosen for settlement.⁵

The remittance man period lasted from the 1870s to the beginning of World War I.

Herbert Logan organized the Elk Creek Road Company in 1890 to construct the twisting toll road over Tillamook Head from Seaside to Elk Creek (today's Cannon Beach).

References to remittance men are peppered throughout the oral histories found in the archive of the Cannon Beach Historical Society.⁶ Some citizens of Cannon Beach remember the local remittance men as lazy, shiftless alcoholics who relied on their payments from home rather than working at a job. Yet, it is clear that the remittance men in Cannon Beach played a significant role in settling the area, and they appear to have had a strong influence on the town's character. Several people who have lived most of their lives in Cannon Beach remember remittance men working at odd jobs around town in connection with the early construction and maintenance of tourist rental cottages and summer homes. As small children, they heard stories about the remittance men, told by town locals who gave the men nicknames such as Jimmy the Tough and The Hermit of Falcon Cove. One woman told me that her cousin had married a Cannon Beach remittance man, but she admonished me, "Do not tell her I told you so!"

One story about Herbert Logan addresses his habit of formal dining at the Elk Creek Hotel, which he built. During the 1890s, he spent many evenings alone in his remote resort hotel, situated on the thickly forested bank of Elk Creek. According to accounts, he instructed his Chinese servant to set a table with fine linens, ornate sterling silver candlesticks, and silver service pieces that he had brought with him from England. He dressed formally in his best suit and starched collar and sat at a long dining table, drinking to excess and dining alone in the candlelight. One evening, when Samuel Adair, a local homesteader and business associate, arrived at the hotel to speak with Logan, Logan's servant reported that he was "dining" and could not be disturbed. After Adair insisted, he was admitted into the elegant candlelit dining room, where Logan explained that he regularly dined that way so he would not forget his home on England's Devonshire coast, a favored and sophisticated beach resort where wealthy British aristocrats kept opulent country homes.⁷

Situated on the coast eighty miles west of Portland and twenty-five miles south of Astoria, Cannon Beach remained unsettled by whites before the 1880s because of its geographic barriers, Tillamook Head to the north and Neahkahnie Mountain to the south. Its nine-mile beach was inaccessible to homesteaders until 1891, after Herbert Logan surveyed and financed the construction of a single-lane wagon road with over a hundred hairpin turns over Tillamook Head.⁸ In 1890, Logan and other businessmen in neighboring Seaside initiated a plan to access and open the isolated beach to tourism. The same year the train from Astoria reached Seaside with increased numbers of summer tourists.

Logan's wagon road to Cannon Beach finally left Seaside the following year and connected the burgeoning resort with potential tourism expansion on the south side of Tillamook Head. Once the road was a reality, fourteen Clatsop businessmen drew lots and filed homestead claims in Cannon Beach, eager to increase tourism capital with their new claims to the south.⁹ At least five members of the group were British emigrants, including Logan. Most of the others were established in professions and businesses from Astoria and Seaside. Some were the descendents of Oregon pioneers, such as Samuel Adair, the son of Henry Adair and the grandson of Civil War Gen. John Adair of Astoria, Oregon's first U.S. customs officer. Astoria resident John N. Griffin, president of the Astoria Abstract Title and Trust Company, acquired one of the fourteen homesteads in 1892. Others who came to file claims and live permanently included the Warren brothers and the Bartel family from the Willamette Valley and the Braillier family from Tillamook, whose descendents remain on the homestead property today. After a steady tourist trade began to build in Cannon Beach, single women such as Emily Cornell, the daughter of Oregon pioneer William Cornell, purchased land and operated some of the town's earliest cottage rentals in 1912.

Many of those who arrived in Cannon Beach over Logan's road, especially those who intended to develop and profit from the expanding tourism interacted with and relied on the local remittance men to construct, maintain, and repair their cottages and second homes and to keep watch over their properties when they were absent. Most of the remittance men lived year-round at their Cannon Beach homesteads and supplied the summer residents with sustenance as well as transportation from Seaside — over the road, across the creek, and down the beach to Arcadia and Arch Cape. Yet, over the years, most people appear to have been ambivalent about these men's contributions. Few people seemed interested enough to record exactly who the remittance men were or to ask why they had left their English homes. How did they acquire their stigma, and whatever became of them?

AT THE END OF THE nineteenth century, many of Britain's families asked their second sons to leave home. There were several reasons for the requests, but it was mainly because of coinciding cultural and economic changes in British society. One factor was the country's primogeniture laws, which held that the exclusive right of property inheritance belonged to the first-born son. To prevent land and its holdings from being divided up, all daughters and second sons were denied rights to the bulk of their family's wealth, although they were provided with allowances while times were good.¹⁰ The laws had served British landowners well since medieval times, ensuring that large parcels of land remained in the same family for generations and preventing landholdings from becoming fragmented and diffused among multiple heirs and spousal in-laws. The wealthy landowners were members of the aristocracy who did not work at jobs, and their income was derived from leasing out the lands for agriculture, industry and mineral extraction. At the time, a "gentleman" was legally defined as "a man who has no occupation."¹¹

During the 1870s, Britain experienced a recession that ultimately evolved into what became known as the Long Depression, which lasted until the mid-1890s.¹² At the same time, in response to a new social liberalism spreading through British culture, members of the lower classes were entering universities and professions such as the military and the clergy, which had once been reserved for upper-class males. Money was severely devalued during the recession, and it became increasingly difficult to support upper-class lifestyles. Most so-called gentlemen had received little or no preparation for work while attending British private schools, and they were unprepared to support themselves. They had been educated to be "gentlemen" and had anticipated no need for practical subsistence skills. In addition, competition for lucrative marriages increased during hard times, making such unions more difficult to attain. As a result, Britain's upper-class second sons found themselves struggling with devalued allowances and competing for employment. Some expressed their frustration in sometimes embarrassing behaviors, such as heavy drinking and womanizing. The ailing economy and loss of class privilege presented difficult circumstances for Britain's aristocracy, and they soon acquired yet another burden — superfluous and misbehaving sons.¹³

Herbert Logan's Elk Creek Hotel was tucked into the forest at the edge of Elk (Ecola) Creek.

Guests at Herbert Logan's Elk Hotel traveled to Elk Creek on a stagecoach during the 1890s.

One socially acceptable solution to the problem was for upper-class families to send their second sons away from Britain to seek independent fortunes elsewhere. They encouraged the men to leave by offering financial assistance, and their sons departed, with the promise of financial stipends to ease their relocation. Exporting extra sons, misbehaving or otherwise, soon became a common practice. Many wealthy U.S. families also adopted the practice. Ruth Hope remembers living next door to an East Coast remittance man in Astoria while growing up there. Her parents called him a remittance man and therefore the word has always been in her vocabulary. To her knowledge, he never worked and visited his family in the East once a year, bringing back maple sugar for Ruth's family.¹⁴

From the 1870s until World War I, upper-class second sons left Britain by the thousands.¹⁵ Many arrived in Oregon, as well as other parts of the western United States and western Canada. Additional thousands traveled to India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the South Seas, and the Caribbean. Some remittance men stayed on the move and had money from their families forwarded to each new location. Some tried a variety of jobs and enterprises, often with little success, while others chose to live modestly on their remittances. Generally, they seldom married and often lived and traveled in pairs or groups.¹⁶

The remittance men who settled Cannon Beach covered the gamut of all the general perceptions that people maintained about these British emigrants, including the negative ones. Some Cannon Beach residents, for example, remember Joe Walsh for his drunken escapades and indolence. Born in Darwin, England, in 1865, Joe Walsh was Herbert Logan's longtime friend while they lived on the Clatsop coast, and they were together for most of their shared time in Oregon. In 1891, when he was twenty-six years old, Walsh filed a land claim in Arch Cape. Eugenia Holderman, an early resident of Arch Cape, remembers that Walsh told locals that his family owned silk mills in England and that he had arrived in the United States on his family's yacht.¹⁷

John Griffin, whose parents owned a neighboring homestead and who spent his childhood summers at Arcadia Beach during the 1890s, recalled that Walsh had an exceptionally fine claim with bottomland suitable for grazing cattle. Griffin said Walsh built two houses and stocked cattle. Walsh's home was neat and tidy and he was well liked, Griffin remembered, but he did have his vices. In one story, Walsh traveled to Seaside whenever his remittance check arrived, and he used up his entire amount drinking and gambling in town. Walsh's horse knew the way back home across Tillamook Head, according to Griffin, and no matter how drunk Joe got, his horse would get him back to Arch Cape. When he was a child, Griffin remembered, he often saw Walsh return from Seaside. "I remember one time the tide was well in and here came Joe on his horse dragging through the soft sand and drift logs. Just as he reached our place Joe fell off his horse."¹⁸

To supplement his remittances, Walsh did odd jobs around Cannon Beach and raised a few head of cattle. According to Holderman, he lost his house to gambling debts and moved into a house on Astbury Creek. She remembered that Walsh never worked at a job, but he apparently managed the Elk Creek Hotel prior to Holderman's arrival in Arch Cape and he butchered his cattle to sell in town when he needed additional cash. Walsh lived at Cannon Beach for over thirty years. He never married and died in 1923.¹⁹

Those who remembered Walsh in their oral histories considered him a bit of a scoundrel and a wastrel. Instead of pursuing financial success and working hard, they recalled, Walsh chose to exist on his wits, doing only what was required for his survival. It appears that most early Cannon Beach residents resented his way of life and blamed his remittances for his perceived lack of success and accomplishment. Few understood the circumstances that had led to the exile of Walsh and other remittance men or the lives they had left behind.

Joe Walsh, one of the Cannon Beach remittance men, posed for a photograph in front of the Elk Creek Hotel in 1892.

Courtesy of Clatsop County Historical Society

Nearly everywhere remittance men settled, the local populations received them with resentment. In the United States, most of the people who emigrated from Europe arrived with the goal of making a better life, but it was not often that they had left behind a better life. Most arrived with a commitment to work hard; and even if they failed to improve their circumstances, they were held in positive social esteem as "hardworking people."²⁰ For the newly arriving British second sons, however, it seemed that hard work was reserved for those who were beneath their social status; and it certainly could not be understood as a way to improve an already refined lifestyle. These young second sons had arrived with the skills and trappings necessary for living an aristocratic life of sport and leisure and little else. They carried with them expensive hand-tailored clothes, starched collars, cricket bats, and sterling silver teapots and candlesticks. Many used their British pounds to hire servants as Logan did. As a result, in frontier communities they were generally met with resistance, resentment, and ridicule. They were also often cheated and fooled out of their remittances and considered fair game for local con artists and thieves. Remittance men soon learned to stick together and, if necessary, to keep moving.²¹

Many brochures and books were published to assist families with preparations for their sons' move, promising remittance men new beginnings and opportunities. Making a Start in Canada, Letters from Two Young Emigrants, published in London in 1889, was a typical brochure for travel to British Columbia. It instructed departing sons to prepare properly for life in the wilderness by taking along provisions that included the following:

A dress suit plus one best suit
A tennis suit
Two pair of corduroy trousers
A dressing gown
Twelve flannel shirts
Two dress shirts with six starched collars
Four vests
Twelve pocket-handkerchiefs
Twenty-four pairs of socks
Six Turkish towels
A pair of large thick blankets and a rug
A pair of boots, dress shoes and a pair of slippers²²

Other publications suggested packing straw boater hats, riding boots, cricket bats, tennis rackets, paint sets and easels, musical instruments, bottles of single-malt scotch, and full tea services of china and silver. This might explain Herbert Logan's silver service, fine linens, and candlesticks.

Soon after arriving in the North American frontier, however, most of these exiled sons discovered that their opportunities had been exceedingly oversold. They found that they had no skills for survival, let alone financial success, in their new environment. The money from home did not go far, though they and their families had been led to believe it would. Provisions were more expensive than they had anticipated, and many remittance men attempted to learn how to make a living by panning for gold, ranching, planting orchards or wheat, sometimes attempting all simultaneously. Most failed in their attempts, often losing their investments from lack of knowledge or experience. Their failures worked to reinforce their belief that hard work proffered little, and they were too proud to return to England. Therefore, they often tried to make the best of it by staying on in a town and waiting for the next remittance check to see them through.²³

Many locals perceived the remittance men's cavalier attitude toward hard work to be impertinent and considered their lives to be frivolous, empty, and even corrupt. The men were condemned for their drinking, partying, and "sports hunting."²⁴ No matter how well mannered and well bred the English gentlemen might have been, they were generally snubbed and ostracized. Remittance men became the subjects of jokes and pranks. They were sent on snipe hunts, tricked into making life-threatening mistakes, and cheated out of their money. So-called friends abandoned them when their remittance funds ran out, only to show up again when the next check arrived. Newspapers in the West published stories of the plight of haphazard remittance men, and cartoons frequently depicted them as well-dressed, inebriated fools. Confidence games, such as bogus ranching or farming schools, were created to take advantage of the remittance men's easy money. The schools solicited high advance tuitions for training and delivered nothing. Nevertheless, some remittance men had a moderate success, and those who remained in the same area for an extended period of time became more socially accepted. In the United States, the acquisition of free land through the Homestead Act provided some with an opportunity for stability. In time, local resentment developed into a sort of praise or head-shaking admiration.²⁵

IN CANNON BEACH, the remittance men who persevered over a decade or more received acceptance, and some attained moderate financial success. Herbert Logan was certainly one of them. Logan was born in 1863 at Bournemouth, Dorchester County, and was educated as a civil engineer.²⁶ Dorchester, with a mild climate and good air, was a resort that attracted visitors for health reasons. It would appear, then, that Logan felt comfortable on Oregon's Clatsop beaches and that he was familiar with resort businesses.

In 1890, when he was twenty-seven years old, Logan purchased the Bradbury sawmill on the southeast side of Seaside. He and another remittance man, Robert (Jack) C.F. Astbury, surveyed the Elk Creek Road together, and Logan and a group of Seaside entrepreneurs formed a stock company to build it. In 1891, he homesteaded 168 acres on Elk Creek. The next year, in November, the Astoria newspaper reported that Logan and Astbury had killed a whale that had washed ashore, and Logan had dispatched a crew of men to render the whale blubber into oil to be used to grease the skids of his sawmill. He also attempted to market whale oil to the factories in Portland, but he found that the costs involved far exceeded any profitability.²⁷

Logan's sixteen-room Elk Creek Hotel was built of spruce milled at his sawmill. Guests took the train to Seaside and arrived at the hotel on foot or horseback or aboard Logan's stagecoach over the toll road. The road ended at the hotel, where Logan served a free lunch and refreshments. In 1894, Logan moved the sawmill to downtown Seaside alongside the Necanicum River, where the Avenue G Bridge is located today, and arranged to have the train tracks extended south to his mill's new location.²⁸ The July 24, 1894, Astoria Daily Budget announced that Logan's Elk Creek House had opened up for the season and predicted the hotel would have a banner year.

These tourists were among many who traveled from Seaside to the growing resort community of Cannon Beach.

By July 1896, however, Logan had mortgaged his holdings in Seaside to John Poole in order to purchase the Seaside Pavilion and to build a box factory next door to his sawmill. The following year, he began selling off his interests in his Seaside businesses, including the horses used on his stagecoach line. The Seaside Lumber Company, which was incorporated with three shareholders on July 26, 1897, included a general logging and lumber operation as well as the operation and maintenance of electric lighting plants for individual and business use. By October 1897, Logan was issued a license to sell liquor.²⁹ It was at this time that he appears to have moved permanently into the Elk Creek Hotel to live fulltime in Cannon Beach.

By the summer of 1899, Logan may have become too ill to run the hotel, and he leased the management to Joe Walsh.³⁰ Several months later, on November 16, 1900, the Astoria Daily Budget reported that Logan had returned to England where he was recuperating from an "incurable paralysis." He died on January 14, 1906, and was buried at the family plot in Bournemouth. He was forty-three years old.³¹ Logan invested his financial remittances into over eight different business ventures during in his fifteen years on the Oregon Coast. When he died, his probate consisted of his free homesteaded land and its sixteen-room hotel. He had lost everything else. But Logan also left another legacy — a lasting place in Cannon Beach history for his contributions to opening and developing the area.

Two of Logan's fellow remittance men were also civil engineers. Before establishing homesteads in Cannon Beach in 1891, Harry Bell and Jack Astbury lived and worked together in Astoria. After conducting a survey of Astoria for the State of Oregon in 1890, they surveyed and platted most of the nine-mile beach at Cannon Beach. Each also worked as the city surveyor for Astoria. Bell, who was born in England in 1864, took unusual steps for a remittance man when he became a naturalized citizen on September 4, 1895, and then married Polly McKean in Astoria four years later. The couple had two children, and Bell died in 1932.³²

OF ALL THE CANNON BEACH remittance men, Jack Astbury possessed what many think of as the traits of the British upper class. Astbury was a popular bachelor remembered for his dancing skill, and he was socially active in Seaside and Astoria, as well as Cannon Beach. A creek in Arch Cape, which originally flowed through his homestead claim, is named after him; today it flows down Sally's Alley. Astbury's Cannon Beach homestead may have been a second home, since he allowed Joe Walsh to move into the house after Walsh lost his own house to gambling debts. People remember that Astbury enjoyed sports and most other social activities and was known as a ladies' man. He led a modest life and was reportedly generous to his fellow emigrants. He also achieved recognition through his survey work, an uncommon accomplishment for a remittance man. In his oral history, John Griffin described Astbury as "a real English gentleman of good background and education. Even his house showed good taste and artistry."³³

Marmaduke Maxwell (fourth from left) stands on Cannon Beach with Eugenia Holderman (on his right) and other neighbors in about 1925.

In 1895, Astbury was made captain of the Seaside cricket team, and it is easy to imagine the area's remittance men gathered together on the Clatsop Coast for cricket matches in the summer. In addition to serving as city surveyor of Astoria in 1900, he was also Clatsop County surveyor the same year. According to the Astoria Budget, he went on to survey for the quarantine station on the north side of the Columbia River in 1904, as well as the beach bulkhead established at Seaside in 1906. By 1908, Astbury was growing apples in Gold Hill, Oregon. He outlived most of his fellow remittance men, never married, and died in 1945 after spending fifty-four years of his life on Oregon's north coast.³⁴

Another remittance man in Cannon Beach was James Jacob Mahar, also known as Jimmy the Tough, who homesteaded north of Silver Point before 1894.³⁵ Mahar's principal pastime was fishing. When there was a low tide, he would swim a mile or so to Jockey Cap Rock and fish all day, returning on the high tide at night. He sold the fish he caught to visitors and to locals living along the nine-mile beach.³⁶

Marmaduke Maxwell stands in front of the barn on Joe Walsh's homestead.

Some remittance men in Cannon Beach and elsewhere never had to make the monthly trek to a bank, perhaps because they received their funds in a lump sum. This would have allowed them to avoid the stigma associated with being financially supported. One such remittance man could have been a rugged Irishman named Mike Powers, who worked as a logger in Cannon Beach during the summer and cleared homestead claims and built beach houses in the winter. In 1900, John Griffin's parents hired Powers to clear land and then to design and build their second cottage on Arcadia Beach. Powers enclosed a flower garden with a small rustic fence and created a path of shells through it. He mortared hundreds of seashells into panels on the interior walls of the cottage alongside the fireplace.³⁷ It was a British-style country cottage.

Griffin does not identify Powers as a remittance man, but his life does fit the general pattern. Powers remained a bachelor in the Clatsop enclave near his fellow British citizens for several decades. He never married and had no known relatives in this country. Powers died at the age of seventy in Seaside in 1915, fifteen years after completing the Griffin cottage.³⁸ Powers is not listed in any of the local cemeteries, and his remains may have been returned to Ireland for burial, as was frequently the case for these men who died so far from home.

PERHAPS THE MOST enigmatic and best remembered of the British emigrants to settle in Cannon Beach at the turn of the twentieth century was Marmaduke Maxwell. Those who remember the tall, white-haired, and whiskered Maxwell told me that he was most certainly not a remittance man. "No," they say, "he was a real gentleman." Still, many of Maxwell's life circumstances in the United States fit the pattern. Lee Olson writes that remittance men had "one common story. It was that the arriving outcast had lost his sweetheart ... so he left home to become a hermit."³⁹ Maxwell told Eugenia Holderman that he was born on March 4, 1843, into a good family in Black Torrington, Devon, England, and that he had been engaged to a woman who contracted pneumonia and died shortly before the wedding date. Maxwell decided to go to America, where he spent time in several places before moving to Cannon Beach, which he said reminded him of home. The historical records show that Marmaduke Maxwell was twenty-seven years old when he emigrated to the U.S., a common age for Britain's aristocratic second sons to be sent away. He was the ninth of fourteen children born to the Fifth Lord of Maxwell, who sold off the family's tin mines in the mid-1870s.⁴⁰

The first appearance of Marmaduke Maxwell in U.S. records is in the Iowa census of 1870, where he is identified working as a farm handyman and living in a boarding house with Charles Dakyn. He appears next in the records of Douglas County, Oregon, in the 1880 census, again working as a handyman while living with Charles Dakyn and his wife, who were British citizens. In 1886, Maxwell was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in The Dalles, Oregon, while living on a nearby ranch and working as a handyman. His mother died the same year, leaving him some personal property, but his whereabouts are not mentioned in the estate documents and it is not known if he ever received his inheritance.⁴¹

In Wasco County, from 1889 to 1900, Maxwell recorded numerous deeds of title to large parcels of land. Approximately thirty transactions were recorded over ten years, including 160 acres of free land that Maxwell homesteaded in 1896. During the same period, he evidently also loaned money to locals, as numerous mortgages were recorded by Maxwell to secure personal notes. It seems likely that he received a large amount of money, more than he could have accumulated working at odd jobs. The land he acquired with the money was, for the most part, contiguous to the Imperial Ranch, a large sheep ranch in Shaniko. Eventually, Maxwell sold off over 6,000 acres in two parcels, one in 1910 and the other in 1915. In 1912, he purchased property in Arch Cape at the far end of Cannon Beach abutting the property of Joe Walsh, who became his close compatriot.⁴²

Maxwell and Dakyn were never far apart, and the 1920 census lists both of them living in Cannon Beach, the seventy-seven-year-old Maxwell retired and employed as a farm laborer and the seventy-three-year-old Dakyn unemployed. In Arch Cape Chronicles, Holderman writes that "Dakins" was Marmaduke's British friend who often came down the beach to share a ceremonious dinner with Maxwell. Each would dress formally for dinner, with Marmaduke wearing an English tweed jacket with a red tie for the formal affairs. Maxwell suffered a stroke and died in Clatsop County in 1931.⁴³

The house that Marmaduke Maxwell built in Cannon Beach in 1912 still stands today near Maxwell Lane.

Courtesy of the author

THE REMITTANCE MEN who lived in early Cannon Beach homesteaded, surveyed, developed, and established some of the town's earliest tourist enterprises. They were well mannered and educated and most had been asked to leave Britain to seek their fortunes away from home. They brought with them the memories of their lives in Britain and incorporated them into their lives in Cannon Beach. Today, many of the small cottages they built, some now over one hundred years old, stand along the nine-mile beach, evidence of the town's beginnings as a picturesque beach cottage town, an architectural aesthetic that Britain's citizens took with them wherever they settled.⁴⁴ They contributed substantially to establishing the physical and cultural ambiance of the Cannon Beach area by investing British pounds and influences from home. As local storyteller Peter Lindsey notes, "I guess every small town has had its characters, but Cannon Beach has been blessed with a particularly rich vein, a mother lode...."⁴⁵ The remittance men are part of that heritage, Britain's second sons who chose their second homes on the Clatsop coast.

Notes

This article is dedicated to Richard Brian Bant, a contemporary British gentleman bachelor who currently lives in Cannon Beach without remittances from home. Portions of this paper were presented to the Clatsop County Historical Society, "Thursday Night Talks" program on January 5, 2006. I would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers of the Oregon Historical Quarterly for their suggestions.

^1. Mark Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons: British Remittance Men in the Canadian West, 2d ed. (Toronto, Ont.: Dundurn Press, 2001), 22–28, 77.

^2. Emma Gene Miller, Clatsop County, Oregon: A History (Portland, Ore.: Binford and Mort, 1958), 109; Astoria Daily Budget, April 18, 1907, 2. Logan also homesteaded land in Section 18 along Indian Beach.

^3. John Delbert Griffin, Reflections on Early Cannon Beach (Cannon Beach, Ore.: Margaret Griffin Green, 1977), 8. The definition of "remittance man" has become somewhat revised and reversed. It now refers to migrant workers in developed countries who no longer receive financial assistance from home but send financial remittances back home. See Michele Wucker, "Remittances: The Perpetual Migration Machine," World Policy Journal 21:3 (Fall 2004): 37–46.

^4. Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons, 10; Lee Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey: British Remittance in the West (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1993), 1–12.

^5. Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 9.

^6. See Terence O'Donnell, Cannon Beach: A Place by the Sea (Portland: Cannon Beach Historical Society and Oregon Historical Society Press, 1996), 21. O'Donnell briefly mentions that the remittance men were British emigrants assisted by funds from home and most were considered to be black sheep who were paid by their families to live elsewhere.

^7. Bridget Snow Oral History, December 8, 1982, Cannon Beach Historical Society, Cannon Beach, Oregon [hereafter, Cannon Beach Oral History Collection].

^8. Twenty-eight early homesteads were claimed along Ecola Creek prior to 1890, but they were abandoned or sold off due to the location's inaccessibility; Jill Grady, Cannon Beach Cottages (Sanger, Calif.: Word Dancer Press, 2005), 3–4.

^9. Morris Adair, "Letter to the State Highway Department," February 14, 1964, 4, Cannon Beach Oral History Collection.

^10. Primogeniture law was in force throughout the British Isles from medieval times until its abolishment in 1925 with the passage of the Administrations of Estates Act. See Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons, 16; Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 3–4. The practical effects of such inheritance laws are clearly illustrated in Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice. See Debra Teachman, "Law and Custom: Inheritance and Marriage," in Understanding Pride and Prejudice: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources and Historical Documents (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 27–53.

^11. See Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 1, for definition of a gentleman. Primogeniture law was in force throughout the British Isles, including Ireland, Wales, and Scotland from medieval times until its abolishment in 1925 with the passage of the Administration of Estates Act. Zuelhke, Scoundrels, Dreamers and Second Sons, 16.

^12. Avner Offer, "Costs and Benefits, Prosperity and Security, 1870–1914," The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 690–711.

^13. Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers and Second Sons, 13–28, and Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 1–12.

^14. Ruth Hope, letter to the author, January 23, 2006. See also Kay Atwood, Blossoms and Branches: A Gathering of Rogue Valley Orchard Memories (Ashland, Ore.: K. Atwood, 1980).

^15. "In 1880, the number of Britons sailing first class to non-European destinations totaled 56,734. By 1900, the number had jumped to 86,914, and in 1912, the number was 266,145. The majority of these upper-class travelers were leaving Britain to try their luck in a new country." See Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons, 90. Zuehlke's figures are for first-class emigrants only. See also Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 113, which gives a staggering total of 13 million Britons leaving between 1850 and 1911.

^16. With time, the remittance practice and its practicing Brits became memorialized in literature and song. The remittance man phenomenon included the children of well-known Brits, such as Charles Dickens who contracted with his fifth-born child, Francis [Frank], to leave and receive financial assistance overseas. Frank Dickens was perceived as a ne'er-do-well who stuttered badly and had great difficulty adjusting to schools and other social settings. He was sent first to India, where he was offered a position in the Bengal Mounted Police. Failing there, he traveled to Canada, where he failed in the Northwest Mounted Police. His Canadian superiors wrote Ottawa headquarters that Frank was lazy, alcoholic and unfit to be an officer. This behavioral assessment was the general perception held of the remittance man throughout North America. See Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 143.

^17. Eugenia Holderman, "History of Arch Cape," in Arch Cape Chronicles: A Bit of Oregon's Past, ed. David English and Alma English (Seaside, Ore.: Frontier Publishing, 1993), 188.

^18. Griffin, Reflections on Early Cannon Beach, 8–9.

^19. Holderman, "History of Arch Cape," 188. Walsh was buried at Seaside Cemetery. See Jim Dennon, Evergreen Cemetery City of Seaside (Astoria, Ore.: Clatsop County Genealogical Society, 1988).

^20. Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 10.

^21. See Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons, 29–40; 41–63; and Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 214–19. See Ferguson, Empire, 257–8, with regard to the engagement of upper class young men in sports and leisure.

^22. Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons, 30–2, citing Herbert Edmund Church, Notes from an Emigrant in the Canadian Northwest (London: Methuen and Co., 1929).

^23. Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 193–205.

^24. Sports hunting included chasing "harried" coyotes on horseback across the prairies in the same manner that foxes were chased across the British countryside when the aristocracy rode to the hounds. Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreamers & Second Sons, 130.

^25. Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 145, 169–78, 216. For cartoon photos, see www.fortsteele.ca/exhibits/kootenay/ethnic/rmen.asp (accessed March 5, 2007).

^26.www.curiousfox.com Genealogy Web site (accessed December 18, 2005).

^27. Inez Stafford Hanson, "When the Train Reached Seaside ...," Oregon Historical Quarterly 58:2 (June 1957): 127–44, 134; Inez Stafford Hanson, Life on Clatsop (self-published, 1970), 61; Miller, Clatsop County Oregon, 109; Daily Morning Astorian, November 23, 1892, 1; Astoria Daily Budget, April 27, 1893, 1.

^28.Astoria Daily Budget, March 25, 1894, 1.

^29.Astoria Daily Budget, July 2, 1896, 3; October 8, 1897, 3; Hanson, Life on Clatsop, 79.

^30.Astoria Daily Budget, July 12, 1899, 4.

^31. Ibid, February 6, 1906, 6.

^32. Griffin, Reflections on Early Cannon Beach, 9; Astoria Daily Budget, January 1, 1900, 4; Daily Morning Astorian, September 4, December 12, 1895; Jim Dennon, Clatsop Plains Pioneer Cemetery (Astoria, Ore.: Clatsop County Genealogical Society, 1987).

^33. Griffin, Reflections on Early Cannon Beach, 9.

^34.Daily Morning Astorian, January 4, 1900; June 5, 1900, 1; Astoria Budget, November 16, 1945, 2.

^35. Mahar was also spelled "Mayar" and "Mehan." Perhaps his Irish brogue contributed to the difficulty in spelling his name. See English, Arch Cape Chronicles, 15; O'Donnell, Cannon Beach, 21; Griffin, Reflections On Early Cannon Beach, 8.

^36. The Astoria Daily Budget published an obituary for "J.J. Mahan," who died at age seventy-six in Astoria on October 23, 1914. This man was not the same Jimmy the Tough who lived at Silver Point, and it must be assumed that Jimmy the Tough departed Cannon Beach, perhaps after selling his claim.

^37. Griffin, Reflections on Early Cannon Beach, 3.

^38.Astoria Daily Budget, March 24, 1915, 6.

^39. Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey, 194.

^40. Anthony Maxwell, personal communication with the author, April 20, 2006. Maxwell is the great-great-grandnephew of Marmaduke Maxwell, who posted a search on the Maxwell Genealogy Forum on July 29, 2004, which stated: "... searching for information about the 'black sheep' of the family, Marmaduke."

^41. Anthony Maxwell, personal communication with the author, January 3, 2006.

^42. Holderman, Arch Cape Chronicles, 189–90.

^43. Ibid.

^44. Karen Sayer, Country Cottages: A Cultural History (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 21.

^45. Peter Linsey, Comin' In Over the Rock: A Storyteller's History of Cannon Beach (Cannon Beach, Ore.: Saddle Mountain Press, 2004), 78.

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