IN THE 1920s and 1930s, if you lived in the rocky wilderness along the upper Rogue River, or the mountainous area known as the Oregon Craggies, you lived in one of the most remote patches of the state.
There were no roads, only mule paths. Most folks didn’t make it into town more than once or twice a year. It was a 40-mile hike for most of them out to Gold Beach, or inland to the railroad station at West Fork, a tiny outpost that’s now a ghost town near the forks of Cow Creek.
But there was a mailman who came by every week or two with catalogs, packages, letters, and news from the outside world.
The arrival of that mailman would be a big event. Actually, the arrival of any visitor was a big event in that remote place. Tools would be put down, coffee would be put on the woodstove if it wasn’t already hot, and the mailman would be invited to sit down and rest ... and talk.
A scene on the Rogue River National Recreation Trail, where 100 years ago Hathaway Jones led his pack mules delivering the mail. (Image: Kyle Sullivan/US Bureau of Land Management)
The mailman who carried letters and packages on the run from West Fork to Illahe, from 1898 until 1937, was a compact, rangy, and unforgettable character with a harelip covered with an enormous mustache, by the name of Hathaway Jones.
For the residents in the Craggies and along the Rogue River, Hathaway Jones was the closest they had to a broadcasting service.
There would be a National News report — what was going on in the outside world? What were people talking about in the hotels and bars and railroad station at West Fork?
There would be a Local News report: How were the other members of the Rogue River community doing? Was Zane Grey coming back to his fishing cabin for the season? Had Crazy Hugo Mayer, the “Hermit of the Craggies,” been found yet, and how was poor Annanette Fantz holding up after Crazy Hugo murdered her husband? Whose daughter had gotten married, and did we know the groom? Who was away visiting relatives in town?
And, of course, there would be some entertainment programming. This would consist of yet another episode of what we might call the Hathaway Jones Show....
One of the early gasoline-powered mailboats on its way back downriver to Gold Beach, with the Agness bridge in the background. (Image: Postcard)
For each Hathaway Jones Show episode, Hathaway, speaking with dead earnestness in his funny and idiosyncratic way through his harelip and cleft palate, would tell a story about his own family life, usually centering around his grandfather Ike. The story would start out reasonable, but would quickly go off the rails into hilarious excess. But no matter how the listener reacted, Hathaway would never crack a smile or show any sign that he wasn’t delivering verbatim gospel straight out of the Good Book.
A few of the Hathaway Jones tales have, luckily for us, been remembered and written down. You'll find a few of these in the sidebar on the right — and there are plenty more where they came from, to reward anyone who wants to pick up a copy of Stephen Dow Beckham's fantastic collection, Tall Tales from the Rogue River.
HATHAWAY JONES WAS a third-generation Rogue River mountain man, born in 1870. Tall tales (usually just referred to as “lies”) were a family tradition for the Joneses, and had been since Hathaway’s grandfather, Ike Jones, arrived in Roseburg from Ohio with wife Anna, several children, and “a wagonful of lies about fish, skunks, snakes, and bears,” as historian Tom Nash puts it.
One of those children was a 12-year-old lad named William Sampson Jones, who, when he grew up, got a job tending bar in Roseburg and married a girl named Elizabeth Epperson.
Twenty years and eight children later, Elizabeth dumped William (who always went by his middle name, Sampson) and married another man. Sampson, who was now in his 40s and probably having a mid-life crisis, decided to become a miner; so he and one of his sons struck out into the Siskiyous to work a mining claim on the east fork of Mule Creek.
The son Sampson took with him into the wilderness was his third son, Ivan Hathaway Jones. Like his father, Ivan went by his middle name.
By about 1890, Sampson and Hathaway were living and mining near Battle Bar on the Rogue. This was a very remote spot. As the crow flies, Battle Bar is roughly equidistant from Gold Beach, Bandon, Myrtle Creek, and Grants Pass — about 40 miles from each, smack in the middle of the wilderness.
The two of them lived at Battle Bar as long as they were able to — Sampson until he got too old to stand the rugged mountain-man life, and Hathaway until his death in the fall of 1937, when a saddle cinch broke as he was riding his mule and caused him to fall over a 25-foot cliff.
There were a few backwoods communities not too many miles downriver, such as Marial and Illahe and Agness; and, of course, if a fellow needed big-city services, he could go all the way down to Gold Beach.
In 1895 the U.S. Postal Service started trying to establish service to these upriver towns and nearby residents. At first they tried to reach them all by boat from the river; but by 1898 they had figured out that Agness was about as far upriver as they could reasonably get. A mule-string packer would have to be hired to take care of all the mining towns and ranch cabins upriver from there. Hathaway Jones, who had become a freight-packing specialist over the years, was the natural choice for the contract to carry that mail.
It was a position he held for the next 40 years, and it was as a backwoods mailman that his reputation as a “liar” grew and flourished.
In 1903, five years into his mail contract, Claude Riddle hired him to pack some mining equipment into a remote claim in the Rogue canyon. Here is how he described his first encounter with Hathaway:
“We were busy assembling our outfit, when we heard the jangle of bells and the scuffle of horses’ feet on the trail. ... The file of horses and mules meandered down the trail to the flat where we had our camp, and Hathaway appeared in person. He was small and short and walked with a forward stoop. His arms were long and his hands seemed to swing ahead below his knees. Later I saw him in profile walking up a hill, taking such long steps that his body bobbed up and down, giving the impression that he was walking on four legs.
“He wore a conical little black hat ... his heavy blue flannel shirt was open and black hair decorated his throat and breast. A narrow leather belt held his pants about his slim hips and it looked like he might come apart in the middle at any time. Hathaway’s speech was most peculiar — a cross between a hairlip and a tongue-tie. His pronunciation of some words was intriguing, and he always seemed in dead earnest.”
That harelip — which Hathaway concealed as best he could by growing an epic Friedrich Nietzsche mustache — would become an important part of Hathaway’s practice as a storyteller. But, more on that in a bit.
When he was on a simple mail run (not hauling lots of freight, like he was doing for Riddle that day) Hathaway typically was accompanied by just one or two mules. It was a long journey from one cabin to the next, and Hathaway would stop at each one for a cup of coffee and a short (or long) visit.
Presumably one of those visits was where Hathaway met Flora Thomas, the woman who would become his wife. They were married long enough to have two children together, but the marriage did not last. For most of his life, Hathaway lived as a bachelor.
Robert and Annanette Fantz were on Hathaway’s mail route, so they would have known him pretty well. Hugo Mayer, the “hermit of the Craggies,” probably did too. Most likely, in 1933 when “Crazy Hugo” murdered Robert Fantz and disappeared, it was Hathaway who spread the word for everyone to watch out for him. One wonders how he managed to convince them it wasn’t all part of another tall tale.
“Sometimes in the evening,” recalled resident Sadie Pettinger, “especially in the late fall or wintertime, when it’d be cold and he’d be cold, he’d come in the kitchen and he’d sit down and talk with me. I’d be goin’ on in the kitchen. And we had a round table behind the stove where the family usually ate, and he'd sit there and he’d cross his knee and —” she chuckled — “and the stories would just roll out.”
“One could not call Hathaway Jones a liar in the actual sense of the word,” said local resident Joel Barker. “They would have to say that he stretched the truth to its un-bustable extent.”
HATHAWAY'S STORIES usually started out ordinary and plausible, although he’d usually set the stage by starting each one out with the words, “You wouldn’t believe this, but ...” He would then launch into some hunting or fishing story that sounded completely believable, turning up the exaggeration more and more as he went until his listeners would suddenly realize that, in spite of themselves, they had started gullibly lapping up whoppers. It was like boiling a frog.
Reading between the lines of the accounts of this remarkable storyteller, it’s clear that he watched his audience very carefully to gauge when they reached that point, the moment when the frog realizes he’s being boiled, and that’s when he would bring his story to a climax of ridiculousness — with the audience laughing along with him, now fully in on the joke.
And he did it all with that complete earnestness that Riddle remarked on, enhanced by the enormous mustache he grew to hide his harelip (and facial expression).
Speaking of the harelip — this is a condition that’s uncommon in the developed world today, because it’s usually corrected surgically in infancy. But, the few folks who do have a harelip still have trouble with strangers wrongly assuming that they are affected with some degree of mental retardation, because of the odd manner of speech. The practice of some well known comedians of the past, who leaned hard on the harelip jokes because they were easy to do, doesn’t help either.
By playing his stories relentlessly straight and with dead-eyed earnestness, Hathaway made his harelip work to his advantage, because in folks who hadn’t met him yet (and even some who had!), it delayed the “frog boiling” moment until very late in the conversation.
But most of Hathaway’s audience members were local regulars, and they were taking the ride for the fun of it. Remember, these were folks who lived in the next best thing to a howling wilderness; there was no Internet, no TV, and even AM radio was rare. When Hathaway Jones stopped by with the mail, he was the first person from “The Outside” a ranch hand would have talked to in weeks. So Hathaway was not only bringing the mail, but some news of the outside world as well ... and, of course, a new story or two set in the “Hathaway Jones Cinematic Universe.”
LET’S TALK ABOUT Hathaway’s “Cinematic Universe” now. It was a fantasy storyworld that was peopled mostly by members of Hathaway’s family. Knowing well that it would get boring if all the stories he told were about amazing things that had happened to him, he dragged his father and grandfather into it too, as well as other family members on occasion.
Grandfather Ike Jones, in Hathaway’s storyworld, became a sort of magic wild-animal whisperer prone to taking in animal pets and sharing his moonshine with them. His list of pets included a woodpecker named Solomon, a bobcat named Lucifer, a raven named Lemuel, and a cougar named Toots.
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Hathaway Jones as he appeared in the 1920s. (Image: findagrave.com)
Hathaway’s father, Sampson, featured in fewer stories, or at any rate fewer than I’ve found. That probably had to do with the fact that Sampson was still around the area for most of the time Hathaway was spinning his yarns.
And, of course, there were plenty of lies Hathaway cooked up starring himself. He spent his long days on the trail with his mule on story development, sometimes with inspiration from news he acquired from old newspapers when he came downriver into town.
Hathaway Jones' Greatest Hits:
Luckily for all of us, there are a ton of Hathaway Jones stories that have been written down for posterity. Here are just a few of the best and/or funniest of these:
Hathaway's Bear in the Air:
One day, during huckleberry season, Hathaway took a bucket out to fill it up. Around the Rogue both kinds of huckleberries grow — the thicker-skinned blue kind, and the thinner-skinned red ones — and the blue ones were in season and putting forth a bumper crop, some of them as large as small cherries.
A large American Black Bear in the wild. This would have been the sort of bear Hathaway was talking about in his "bear in the air" story. (Image: Diginatur/ Wikimedia Commons)
While working his way around a particularly large bush, Hathaway came face to face with an enormous bear that was working his way around the same bush from the other side.
Hathaway hadn’t been expecting any hunting opportunities, so he’d left Old Betsy back in the cabin. “Well, good morning, Mr. Bear,” Hathaway said in his most ingraciating tones, tipping his pointy black hat and backing away slowly. “Why don’t you just go ahead and take the rest of these?”
Unfortunately this turned out to be one of the few bears in the forest whom Hathaway’s grandpa Ike had not taught to understand English. It gave a horrible roar and charged.
Hathaway, concluding from this evidence that his charm offensive was a bust, implemented Plan B immediately and at top speed.
Hathaway knew the bear could run faster than he could going uphill and could roll faster than he could going downhill. So he decided to solve this problem with science and logic.
Hathaway figured that if he ran around the mountain at the same level, following the lines of a topo map, the bear’s greater weight would cause him to lose elevation. Then he could stop real suddenly and the bear’s greater weight would cause him to be unable to stop in time, and as he went by Hathaway could give him a push from the side so that he would tumble down the mountain, giving Hathaway time to get away.
So, did it work? Well, it would have, but the trail the two of them were following came right up to the edge of a cliff, with a tall, slender fir tree at the edge. There was nowhere to run.
Time for Plan C. Hathaway scrambled up the fir tree as fast as he could climb. But then the tree shook, and, looking down, Hathaway saw the bear climbing up behind him, still just as mad as ever.
Hathaway tried to outclimb the bear, and was doing a pretty good job of it, but he ran out of tree before he could get away. Up at the very top of the tree, he looked nervously down at the bear. He tried going back to Plan A, but his smiling face and soothing words only seemed to make the bear madder.
But, as the bear got closer, the tree started bending. Finally it bent so close to the ground that Hathaway decided it was time for Plan D, which he implemented on the instant: He jumped off the tree.
Relieved of Hathaway’s weight, the tree snapped back erect, hurling the bear out over the cliff and across the canyon, which was about a mile wide at that point. Hathaway watched the tiny bear-shaped speck in the distance come down in the top of another slim, tall fir tree, which bent over, kissed the ground behind, and threw the bear back across the canyon through the air.
The bear landed in the same tree he’d started from, which whipped back and threw him back to the other tree.
Hathaway watched the bear flying back and forth from tree to tree for a while, then ran down to his cabin and grabbed an ax. Maybe that bear will be better company if I have him for dinner, he thought. So while the bear was in the air, Hathaway chopped down his landing tree.
Unfortunately, the bear saw this, and on his way back, he hastily filed an amended flight plan, veering off to land in the top of a larger tree behind the one Hathaway had chopped down.
This tree threw the bear farther, and he landed in a bigger tree on the other side. Apparently getting into the spirit of the thing, the bear chose larger and larger trees on each flight until he landed in the top of a big old-growth patriarch, which bent like a sapling and launched Old Grizz clear over the top of the 4,000-foot mountain, and that was the last Hathaway ever saw of him.
I’m going to let folklorist Beckham — whose version of this story I have leaned the hardest on here — finish this story:
“A stranger, standing around the post office at Agness and hearing Hathaway tell this experience, practically told him he was a liar, whereat Hathaway, curling up one side of his harelip, looked the stranger over and then with patience and condescension answered: “Wouldn’t expect a tenderfoot to believe me, but I can take you to the young fir-tree I chopped down. What better proof would a man with any sense want?”
Ike Jones and Lemuel:
Ike Jones had a way with animals. It seemed like he always had an animal friend — a pet bobcat named Lucifer, a pet toad that smoked cigarettes when he could get them, and several neighboring bears that he cooperated with to catch feral hogs to eat.
A Northern Raven in flight. This bird was photographed in northern California, less than 100 miles from Hathaway Jones’s cabin on the Rogue. (Image: Christian O. Petersen/Wikimedia)
Lemuel was probably the most interesting of Ike’s animal friends, though. He was a large raven, who Ike had pilfered from his mother’s nest as a little chick.
Lemuel grew up a bit cantankerous. After Ike taught him to talk, he occasionally regretted it, because Lemuel often wanted to talk politics, and things could get heated. Ike was a Democrat, and Lemuel was a “Black Republican.” Lemuel also had a huge vocabulary of curse words in both English and Spanish at his command, and deployed them frequently to great effect.
Ike gave Lemuel his name in honor of the Biblical King Lemuel, because his feathered friend was so fond of having his feed corn soaked in moonshine overnight. Either he could read, or someone was regularly reading the Bible to him, because one of his favorite openers was to quote directly from Proverbs 31:6:
“Give strong drink unto him that is about to perish!” Lemuel would squawk imperiously. “Hell, Ike, it’s your treat!”
On one occasion, Ike was off hunting with Lemuel when a boulder rolled onto his foot, trapping him. He was unable to move it, but luckily there wasn’t much pain; so he made himself as comfortable as he could, and asked Lemuel to go rustle him up some grub.
Lemuel darted off in the direction of Ike’s cabin and was gone for 10 or 15 minutes. When he returned, he brought a big piece of jerky, dropped it off, and streaked back in the direction he’d come from. Another quarter-hour later, he was back with a loaf of bread, which he dropped into Ike’s hand as he raced away, back to the cabin.
When he returned this time he had a half-full pint bottle of moonshine in his claws. Obviously this had had to wait for the last trip, as Lemuel didn’t trust Ike not to hog it all while he was off fetching the other food.
So Ike and Lemuel had a nice little supper together there under the rock, with a little swaller of corn liquor for dessert; and then Ike said, “Lemuel, I guess we’d better get some help to get me out from under this rock. Go get Johnnie Fry and tell him to bring an ax.”
An hour or so later, John Fry was at his table eating dinner when he heard a voice at his door hollering, “Johnnie, bring an ax!”
Getting up and opening the door, John saw the big black bird standing by his feet, eyeballing him impatiently. “Well, howdy, Lemuel,” he said. “What do you need? Where’s Ike?”
“The old hijo de la puta madre has got his foot stuck under a rock, damn it,” the raven squawked. “He sent me to get you to come help, with an ax. C’mon, you sonuvabitch, let’s go.”
So John bolted the rest of his dinner, saddled up his horse, and headed out along the river trail, with Lemuel standing on his shoulder and making profanity-laced small talk along the way.
When they got to the scene of the accident, John chopped down a small fir tree, shaped the end of it to fit under the rock, shoved it in, and pried the rock up enough for Ike to get his foot out. Then they all headed up the canyon to Ike’s cabin to rest from the day’s labors.
“Give strong drink unto him that is about to perish!” Lemuel bellowed. “Sonuvabitch it’s been a long damn day.”
Accordingly, Ike set him up with a big slab of bread soaked in moonshine. Johnnie and Ike poured theirs out straight in tin cups, and everyone finished the evening in fine style.
Lucifer's Tragic End:
One day, while out hunting for something to eat, Ike stumbled across a bobcat’s den. In it was a tiny little male kitten, and he looked like something bad had happened to the mother because the little thing was very weak. Ike, of course, promptly took him home.
A bobcat photographed in Arizona. This bobcat would, of course, be about a quarter the size of Ike Jones’s pet Lucifer. (Image: Alan Schmierer/Wikimedia)
The kitten, when he had had a little something to eat and drink and was back to strength, turned out to be feral and fierce. Ike had to work hard to make friends with him, and got scratched and bitten a lot along the way. Ike named him Lucifer because he was such a little demon. But eventually they became fast friends. And a good thing, too, because Lucifer grew up to be an enormous bobcat; he topped out at about 80 pounds. Picture a bobcat the size of a full-grown labrador retriever and you’ve got the idea.
Lucifer, in turn, befriended the covey of quail that lived near the cabin under Ike’s protection. The quail learned to love him, and treated him like a big furry sofa.
Protecting the quail meant fending off any wild bobcats that might come around. Lucifer seemed to have wild-bobcat radar. Every now and then Ike would see him slink into the bushes with his hackles up, and, as folklorist Stephen Dow Beckham puts it, “it would not be long before sounds of a super cat fight would resound through the forest. Then, after a short time, Lucifer would come into the cabin and crawl under the blankets with Ike.”
Then one spring, a young family moved into the canyon just downstream from Ike’s cabin. They were a young couple with a two-year-old daughter, and the little girl became great friends with Lucifer, who started bringing her presents the way housecats sometimes do — only Lucifer, being bigger than a housecat, brought her bigger presents: rabbits and wood rats and occasionally a squirrel.
Then one day, while she was playing by the edge of the clearing, the little girl was pounced on by a cougar, which carried her off screaming through the woods in the direction of its den.
Attracted by the screams, the mother and father raced through the woods after them.
Then the screams changed, and became the sounds of the mother of all cat fights. They were quite close to the scene when the sounds subsided and they heard the voice of their daughter.
“Wake up, Woosifoo,” the little voice babbled. “Wake up. Wet’s pway some mo. Wake up, Woosifoo.”
Then they were on the scene. Their little girl was surrounded on three sides by dead animals: A rabbit, an enormous cougar, and Lucifer. The girl was shaking Lucifer, trying to wake him up; but a big pool of blood around his head made it clear that Lucifer had won his last great cat fight, and with victory had come death.
It was clear that Lucifer had been bringing the rabbit to the little girl when he’d spotted the cougar carrying her off, and stepped in to save her, laying down his life for hers.
The father took off his coat and laid it over Lucifer’s body, and the next day the little family joined Ike to have a funeral for the brave bobcat.
Hathaway's rascalliest mule:
I’m going to let folklorist Beckham start this story off with a quote from Hathaway Jones himself:
Hathaway Jones’s string of pack mules about to set out on a delivery run up the Rogue River in 1912. (Image: Meryl Boice/nwrafting.com)
“My wife Florey said to me, ‘You better go out and shoot us a deer. We haven’t got a bit of meat in the cabin for breakfast.’ ”
So, off Hathaway went with Old Betsy, his Army surplus trap-door Springfield buffalo rifle, accompanied by a particularly ornery one of his mules. They crossed the river to hunt on the other side.
Hathaway hadn’t been out for more than half an hour when he spotted a big black bear working over a huckleberry bush. So Hathaway grabbed Old Betsy and, as a mathematician might say, “solved for breakfast.”
This bear was a 500-pounder, at least. He was so fat, the bear grease ran out of the .45-caliber bullet hole and down the mountainside fifty feet.
So Hathaway plugged the hole real quick, picked up the bear, slung him over the mule, and headed for home.
When he got back to the riverbank, there was a big buck standing there having a drink. Out came Old Betsy again, and Hathaway “solved for lunch.”
But now he had a problem. The mule was refusing to cross the river. Hathaway coaxed and pleaded, but that mule absolutely would not cross the river with either the bear or the deer on board.
Poor Hathaway was probably very tempted to grab Old Betsy again and “solve for dinner,” although mules are not nearly as good to eat as bears and bucks; but instead, he tied the buck to the bear, slung the whole wad of dead animals over his back, and started swimming the load across the river.
I’m going to let Hathaway himself (via Beckham) finish this story:
“ ‘About halfway over, I thought I was swimming pretty deep in the water. I looked up and saw that darned mule had clumb up on top of the bear.’ ”
A NEW HATHAWAY Jones lie would spread from person to person after Hathaway told it — people who’d gotten it directly from him would repeat it, as best they could, to all their neighbors who had missed hearing it from him, and it got so that people would swap Hathaway Jones lies instead of making small talk about the weather. It was a little bit like the way fans talk to each other at Comic Con about the latest Indiana Jones movie, except that they would try to add their own bits to it here and there in a standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants kind of spirit.
And, of course, they loved regaling the outsiders who came to the Rogue to hunt, fish, and enjoy the scenery.
The result was that Hathaway Jones’ fame spread far beyond the Rogue River canyon, and by the time of his death he had a reputation as the biggest liar on the West Coast — a reputation Hathaway was quite proud of. Author Nancy Wilson Ross, who spent the summer of 1940 talking to Hathaway’s grieving neighbors (he’d died three years earlier), reported that Hathaway had once only-half-jokingly threatened to sue the Portland Morning Oregonian for slander after the paper identified the “biggest liar in the country” as someone other than himself.
By the time of his accidental death in 1937, his fame had spread so far beyond the Rogue River that the Oregonian actually printed a lengthy, melancholy reflection on his life and work on its editorial page — the gist of which was that we would never see his like again, and that his life’s great work, the based-on-a-true-story lies and exaggerations so infused with the color and flavor of life in the wilderness, would probably soon fade from memory.
Luckily for us, they haven’t, not entirely. A few of Hathaway's best-known creations are in the sidebar to this story; and there are tons more, as I mentioned, in Beckham's wonderful little collection, with lots of charming illustrations. I highly recommend it.
(Sources: Tall Tales from Rogue River, a book by Stephen Dow Beckham published in 1974 by Indiana Univ. Press; The Well-Traveled Casket, a book by Tom Nash and Twilo Scofield published in 1992 by Univ. of Utah Press; “Ivan Hathaway Jones,” an article by Tom Nash published by The Oregon Encyclopedia.)
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