John Mahaffie

Bart Mahaffie Part I — Introduction

March 30, 2018March 10, 2018 by John B. Mahaffie

Further posts in this series:

Bart Mahaffie Part II — Childhood and education

Rule, Colo. 3.12.19

Dear Chas:

I received your letter a couple of weeks ago, but have been busy and didn’t notice how long it had been. Cattle are pretty thin and have to be watched mightily closely to see that they get to feed and don’t stray too far.

The loss has been very light, think I’ve only lost about 10 so far and if the weather will just partly behave from now on there should not be much more loss but most everything is thin now, even the range horses are weak so of course the cattle are bound to be thin.

I was in town last week and got the Heckler papers straightened out and ordered the abstracts. I expect that I’ll buy that land this spring, as he is going to leave and I can’t afford for anyone else to get the place. There are several places around me that are going to be for sale as soon as they are “proved up” and they are sure making me figure. Don’t want to buy anything that I can get a lease on.

Yes, I’ve been getting a novel every once in a while, and am ashamed ashamed that I’ve never even acknowledged the receipt of them but I always write in a hurry so forget about them. The Four Horsemen didn’t come but the W______ did come about that time. I’ve started to read it but have not finished it yet. Have not had much time for reading in the past month.

Do you expect to visit Oklahoma this summer? It is probable that at some yet uncertain date I’ll go down there to get me a housekeeper. There is no definite date yet other than before summer, for it is doubtful yet when I can get away. But if it is convenient and can be figured out far enough in advance I’d like for you to be there.

Must get to bed.

Yours,

G B M Jr.

George Barton “Bart” Mahaffie, by 1919 having lived almost five years alone on his remote southeast Colorado homestead, was joking in this letter to his brother, that he wanted to “get me a housekeeper.” He meant he wanted to marry his sweetheart, Marye Traylor, and he wanted Charles to be there. Bart had lived alone almost 5 years on 480 acres of rough, dry, grazing land in southeastern Colorado, a bachelor rancher.

When I was six or seven, I remember my Great Uncle Oscar Beatty Mahaffie visited my grandparents at their Washington, DC home. It was the mid-1960s. Uncle Beatty and my grandfather, Charles, sat in the upstairs front room in large armchairs, Beatty about ten feet away from my Granddad, two grey, balding old men. They were “visiting,” which for old men like these, prairie-raised, meant sitting almost silent, sipping liquor, and immensely enjoying each other’s company.

But there was a brother missing, George Barton “Bart” Mahaffie. It’s hard to imagine him there. He died of the Spanish Influenza in 1919 at 29, young and in his prime, on his remote Colorado ranch.

The old pictures show the young Bart as an athlete, uniformed and with his teammates, as a scholar at Kingfisher College, and later, branding cattle or on horseback, on his Colorado ranch.

Bart died with most of his potential ahead of him. He endures for me as a tragic story. Yet I have fixed him in my mind as that young man from the old pictures, in his prime. The occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Influenza of 1918 made me think of Bart. I wanted to remember more than the tragedy, so I will tell the story of his life as far as we can know it.

Bart Mahaffie in the winter of 1919

In the late winter of 1919, Bart Mahaffie, aged 29, was hard at work on his ranch in rural southeast Colorado. Winters there were hard. He was at work “proving up” his homestead claims. That meant gaining title to free Federal land by living on it and improving it for stockraising and agriculture.

Bart planned to marry Marye Traylor of Elk City, Oklahoma that May and bring her to his ranch. The lonely bachelor’s life on the ranch would soon be over. He would have a partner to help him build his life in Colorado.

Marye was the daughter of W. E. Traylor. Her father had operated a Hobart, Oklahoma grocery in the mid-1910s. Marye, born in 1892, she was three years younger than Bart, but likely knew him from Hobart High School, or social events in town.

Marye was an accomplished young woman. She played basketball at Hobart High School. The Hobart papers noted her piano playing at weddings, performing Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for the bride and groom. Later she had a long career in business, working as a book bookkeeper and office manager. It’s not hard to imagine her being integral to Bart’s success as a rancher.

Despite the hard winter, Bart could look forward and see his dreams coming into view.

The Spanish Flu of 1918

The Spanish Influenza hit hard in the U.S. the fall of 1918, particularly among massed and returning troops from World War I. Emerging in 1917, it was at first a mild flu; three days of fever, cough, and runny nose, and then a rapid recovery. But the flu virus, which mutates quickly, turned deadly in the summer and fall of 1918. It became a global, deadly pandemic, killing 20 to 50 million people, worldwide, and 675,000 in the United States. The biggest share of its victims were young adults. The lucky got the infection early, before it mutated. They were then protected against the new strain.

A public health chart of deaths from the Spanish Flu, 1919

The Spanish Flu’s symptoms were fever, nausea, aches, and diarrhea. Many victims developed severe bronchopneumonia. Patients would have dark spots on their cheeks. The body under attack by the virus overran with immune response, attacking most aggressively in the lungs. Victims turned blue with a lack of oxygen as their lungs filled with a frothy, bloody discharge. They drowned in their own fluids before treatment could save them.

The flu spread easily and quickly. Doctors could not keep up. People often died before they could get help, but medical help was limited in any case. The flu had no direct treatment, with no antiviral medicines were yet developed. Doctors were not even clear that the disease was viral.

The flu in Colorado

The first cases in Colorado came in late September 1918, with a spike in infections at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The most deaths worldwide were that fall as well.

Mary Allen Hurd, grew up on a neighboring ranch to Bart’s. Years later she remembered: “the flu epidemic came along killing lots of people. Laughing Joe Smith knew there was a couple of new families who lived in a half dugout. He rode over one morning to see if they were all right. He saw stock in the corrals with cows bawling so he went to the house. This couple had four small children and a brother and his wife who lived there also had four small children. Laughing Joe Smith asked the children where their parents were and they said, ‘They are asleep and we can’t wake them up.’ So Joe went in and they were all dead.”

Later posts in this series:

Bart Mahaffie Part II — Childhood and education

Bart Mahaffie Part III — To Colorado for land of his own

Bart Mahaffie Part IV — The flu reaches the 500 Ranch

Bart Mahaffie Part II — Childhood and education

March 30, 2018March 8, 2018 by John B. Mahaffie

Previous post in this series: Bart Mahaffie Part I — Introduction

George Barton “Bart” Mahaffie was the second son and third child of George B. “Doc” Mahaffie and Mary Frances “Mollie” Williams Mahaffie. He was born October 3, 1889, in Olathe, Kansas. His parents were farmers. They also operated a store in Olathe.

Rose, Doc, Bart, Mollie, and Charles Mahaffie, 1891

The Mahaffie’s were a pioneering family. Bart’s grandfather, James Beatty Mahaffie, and grandmother, Lucinda Henderson Mahaffie homesteaded in Olathe, west of Kansas City, and kept a stagecoach stop there at the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail from 1858 to 1870.

Doc and Mollie moved their family when Bart was three to a new homestead in Oklahoma Territory, joining the 1893 Cherokee Strip Land Run which opened Oklahoma lands taken from Native Americans to homesteaders.

During the Land Run, Doc galloped ahead on horseback with his brother Billy to try to secure the best land. Molly drove the team pulling a covered wagon, her three children, Rose, Charles, and Bart, and a household’s supplies aboard. They settled in Kingfisher, Oklahoma Territory. Another child, Oscar Beatty Mahaffie was born there.

Bart’s childhood home, Komalty, Oklahoma

In 1901, when Bart was 11 or 12, the family moved further west to Komalty in Kiowa County, near Hobart, in west-central Oklahoma Territory.

Hobart then was newly settled, with only a few businesses. There Doc raised wheat and livestock, becoming a prosperous rancher trading cattle and mules as far as Amarillo and Wichita.

Mollie ran a busy household and established herself as a community leader, prominent in Hobart’s civic affairs and social clubs. She was elected to the Hobart School Board, its first woman member, and served as School Board President from 1916 to 1919.

Mollie demanded that her children get the best education they could. In older age she said, “We were determined to educate our children if we never had a dollar.”

Before she married, she had taught school for nine years, starting at the age of 16, studying at a teacher’s college, called a normal school, in the summers. That focus on education was surely behind her daughter, Rose, being a school teacher and the fact that all four of her children attended college, two completing advanced degrees.

A little more about Hobart, the Komalty homestead, and Bart’s family is here.

“One of the most popular young men who ever lived in Hobart”

As Bart grew he learned ranching under his father’s tutelage and he got a good schooling under his mother’s direction. He grew to be a popular young member of the community.

Bart was a tall, handsome young man. He had blue eyes and dark hair. By high school, and surely before, he had distinguished himself as an athlete. He stood out, among other places, on the Hobart High School football team. After one game in 1905, the Hobart paper reported: “the sensational play of the game was made by Bart Mahaffie when Lee, Granite’s splendid left halfback, broke away and raced down the field for a touchdown, with a clear track before him excepting Bart, who made a flying tackle and saved Hobart from being scored against.”

High school graduation

Bart graduated from Hobart High School on Friday, May 18, 1906. The ceremony took place at the Presbyterian Church. There were a total of six graduates, most of whom spoke or performed at the ceremony. Bart’s part was to make a speech on the “Flight of the Bat”.

Bart (holding pennant) with his Kingfisher basketball teammates, between 1906-10

Higher education

Bart at Kingfisher College, between 1906-10

In the fall of 1906, Bart started at Kingfisher College where his older brother Charles had graduated in 1905. Over four years, he studied and played sports at Kingfisher, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in June 1910.

That fall, Bart began studying law at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. He was enrolled for two years, but did not take a degree. While studying in Norman, he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and played on the Sooners football team.

After college Bart tried his hand at various jobs. In 1911, he was in Hobart, working for a real estate firm. By 1912, he had gone to work in Dallas for U.S. Bond & Mortgage Co. He visited Hobart late that summer on his way to Oklahoma City, where he was being transferred by his company. Bart continued to work in Oklahoma City until at least April 1914. Likely it was that summer when he left for Colorado to homestead.

Seeing a path for himself

Bart came at last to see a path for himself: to be a stock man like his father, but his own boss with his own ranch.

American generations tended, in the 1800s, to move a state or more westward as each rose to adulthood. Westward meant land and it meant opportunity, a chance to make one’s own way. Families were large and the home place would only be more crowded, less able to support another adult and family.

The Mahaffie’s followed that path through their American generations; Bart Mahaffie’s great great grandfather crossing from Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania, his great grandfather from Pennsylvania to Ohio and then Indiana, his grandfather from Indiana to Kansas. Bart’s father, Doc, moved from Kansas to Oklahoma for new land. And now Bart was moving another state west for his own chance.

There was still land to be had, further west. The papers regularly wrote about Colorado, touting the opportunity to claim land and the state’s beauty and healthful climate. Colorado beckoned.

_________________

Later posts in this series:

Bart Mahaffie Part III — To Colorado for land of his own

Bart Mahaffie Part IV — The flu reaches the 500 Ranch

Resisting the homely snout of commercialism

February 19, 2026August 29, 2015 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 12 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

In the 1910s there was no training for scientific illustrators in New York, and Isabel Cooper didn’t know she was destined to do that kind of work. She loved art, and wanted to be an artist. Newly independent, she saw that she needed work that would satisfy her but also pay her a living.

Isabel had done a freshman year, 1909-1910, at Bryn Mawr College. By her account she was a lackadaisical student.ⁱ Those who knew her later saw a wide-ranging and powerful mind that could have taken her deep into almost any kind of scholarship. But art drew her most.

After freshman year, she returned to New York. She enrolled in Fine Arts at Columbia Teachers College, and began studies at the Art Students’ League, then and still an independent art school in Manhattan. And she found a mentor, taking summer classes with the painter Alon Bement at Lyme Connecticut.

In her training, she tracked close to the path of Georgia O’Keeffe, who also studied at Columbia, at the Art Students League, and with Alon Bement, all at about the same time.

Isabel gravitated toward design classes, and began to work in interior design, perhaps as a surer way to make a living. Paid and unpaid, she tried: drawing from life, rug and tapestry design, clay sculpture, pottery, metalwork, interior decoration, and stage costuming.ⁱⁱIt is unfortunate we don’t have any examples of Isabel’s craft or design work from this time. Somewhere rugs she designed may still survive.

Isabel was good at interior design. It’s likely she worked in the early 1910s for Anton Hellmann, who had a interior decoration practice and school at the Benedict Studios on Washington Square.ⁱⁱⁱ

But she found interior decorating too commercially demanding.^iv Then she tried costume design. She was good at that too, and creating distinct costumes and stage hangings, each time something unique, satisfied her. But then a theater manager, liking a particular costume she had done, demanded fifty more just like it. As she must have conveyed carefully to her interviewer, “commercialism continued to poke its homely snout into her artwork.^v”

Something was still not right. She was built for novelty and adventure, not commercial toil. In fact, later in her life, after she was married and didn’t need to support herself, she resisted selling paintings. In gallery shows, she’d price her work high to ward off buyers. Only a few paintings got away from her in shows, and she tried more than once to buy paintings back.

Once launched in her career as a scientific artist in 1917, Isabel looked back at these years as “going bleakly about my various occupations, such as assisting at the legerdemain of interior decorators, or degrading oriental perfections to terms of modern rug factory…^vi” She was ready for something more interesting.

__________________________

ⁱ Letter, Isabel Cooper to Charles D. Mahaffie, October 17, 1926.

ⁱⁱ John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

ⁱⁱⁱ The Upholsterer, June 1916, Vol. 55, p. 83.

^iv John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

^v John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

^vi “Alumnae Activities,” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 1924.

A young woman’s declaration of independence in the 1910s

February 19, 2026August 25, 2015 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 11 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

Isabel Cooper a few years before her independence

In November 1913, Isabel Cooper went before a Kings County New York Commissioner of Deeds and signed a “General Release,” freeing her Aunt Mary Cooper from guardianship and any financial or legal responsibility for her. This was not an act of rebellion, it was the accepted legal move for a ward, reaching majority, when there was money or property involved in a guardianship.

With her signature, Isabel may have gained control of a small inheritance, but much more importantly, she became a free-acting adult. She was just past 21.

Isabel’s first taste of independence was freshman year at Bryn Mawr College. But she had come home after a year. Then she spent several years studying art at Columbia Teacher’s College and in summer courses in Lyme, Connecticut. She was meeting interesting people and ranging further and further from the staid life she led with Aunt Mary and her aunts Harriet and Joanna.

The aunts were Isabel’s father’s sisters. After James Cooper died in the Klondike, when Isabel was five, the three raised Isabel and her younger brothers Jim and Leslie. The aunts were single, Victorian women, and devout Christian Scientists. Isabel’s two hard-to-manage brothers were mostly off at boarding school, leaving her home with the aunts, and attending a nearby day school.

Isabel's childhood home, 40 West 96th St., NYC — Isabel’s childhood home, 40 West 96th St., NYC

Aunt Mary was, Isabel wrote later, a martinet. It was Mary who sent her to Bryn Mawr, and then who decided, for Isabel, where she would attend art school. Mary’s choice replaced the one Isabel had made. Isabel wrote later that she agreed, but “with rather bad grace.” None of the three aunts was a mother figure. Isabel remembered later that even from her closest Aunt Joanna she got “no embraces or gestures of tenderness”.

In 1911, the family moved from their large row house at 40 West 96th Street, just west of Central Park, to an apartment in Harlem, renting out the house. What had been close quarters with three middle-aged aunts became even closer quarters in just a few rooms for a free-spirited 19-year-old.

Then in July 1913, Aunt Joanna, the only one Isabel was close to, and the one who nutured her artistic interests, died at 53. It was time for independence, and she arranged it about as soon as she could.

Site of Studio House women artist residence, 35 East 62nd — Site of the Studio Club, a residence for single women artists, 35 East 62nd Street, Manhattan

Around the time she signed the General Release, Isabel moved away from her surviving aunts to the Studio Club, a YMCA residence for single women artists, at 35 East 62nd Street. She lived there from from 1913-1915. At the Studio Club, though under the watchful eyes of a house matron, and subject to regular lectures on Christian propriety, Isabel got a further taste of freedom and independence. She was with other young women artists, not older ladies. She could come and go freely (within curfew hours), and she was immersing herself in art. It was the start of a remarkably modern, adventurous life for a woman raised in a Victorian, Christian household by middle-aged aunts.

It’s easy to imagine her folding closed the General Release and putting in her handbag. And she preserved it from then on, and placed it in a glassine sleeve in the scrapbook she made to give highlights of her life and career. Her declaration of independence.