In my research, Sally's grandfather William Ralph Abercrombie, known as "Puppy" in the family, came across my radar as a colorful character of historical significance to the Pacific Northwest. His life also deeply impacted his daughter Clara, Sally's mother. Here's an abstract of his career that I gleaned from interviews with Sally and a couple dozen old newspaper clips I found in her family albums. --JL


As a teenager Sally’s mother, Clara Abercrombie Paine, assumed a difficult mission — to recoup the honor of her family.

Clara’s father, William Ralph Abercrombie, came from a long line of military men — nine generations of generals. One ancestor, John Abercrombie, was a famous English general. After the Abercrombies sided with the Revolutionaries, another ancestor served under George Washington. The future first President of our young nation showed his appreciation to this particular Abercrombie with a handsome velvet-lined wooden bowl, in which are nestled two small silver cups, a memento still treasured by present-day family members.

Ralph, as he was known, was one of thirteen children and grew up in a huge house on a prosperous avenue in Philadelphia. Perhaps all those generations of military medals weighed too heavily on the boy. Whatever his reason, in 1874 fifteen-year-old Ralph ran off to sea, signing up as a cabin boy on a ship headed to foreign ports. It was an inauspicious beginning for what his family assumed would be another distinguished military career. Rebellious by nature, Ralph didn’t even bother to write a letter home informing his parents of his whereabouts.

So when he suddenly reappeared after four years at sea, announcing, “Now I’m ready to be in the army,” there was a slight problem. A person would need some kind of powerful advocate to be accepted into West Point at the advanced age of nineteen. Fortunately, Ralph’s older sister Sally (our Sally’s great aunt) saved the day by writing to her friend. Ralph has returned to the family fold, she wrote, and he wants to attend West Point. Can you help?
Her friend was President Ulysses S. Grant. The Commander-in-Chief responded favorably, something along the lines of, “Ralph doesn’t have a proper education, so we couldn’t send him to the Point, but I will give him a lieutenant’s commission. We’ll send him out West. He’ll be killed, and no one will be disgraced.”

What luck!

In 1877, the second lieutenant was the first soldier to enter Spokane, a settlement of about three shacks. His commander, General Wheaton, had given Ralph permission to ride ahead of the regiment in order to do some fishing. A handsome but haggard white man called out to the soldier.

“Are you alone?” he asked. His name was James Glover. For a week the local Indians had been dancing and drumming and showing signs of increasing hostility toward the white settlers. Glover hadn’t been able to sleep, and he worried this particular day he was worried he might never see the sun rise again.

“No,” answered Ralph, explaining that in two days another 700 soldiers of the Second Infantry would arrive.

Glover was overjoyed.

Instead of being killed in the Indian wars, Ralph survived. In that Ralph lacked the respect for authority he would have gained from West Point, however, his military career progressed in fits and starts. Overall, he was earning the approval of his superiors. He happily lived in tents, fished, built army forts in the Northwest. When he returned home to Philadelphia on furlough one time, he was captivated by Lillian Kimball, belle of the regiment, evolved from another long line of generals. Despite mismatched ages — he was near thirty and she was sixteen — they married. Their daughter Francis arrived, and a few years later another girl, Clara De Normandy Abercrombie.

In 1898, when Clara was just two years old, the family was forced to prepare for the deprivations of Ralph’s new marching orders. The war department was sending him into the wilds of Alaska. The older child, they reasoned, could survive a primitive lifestyle, but it was deemed too harsh for little Clara, who was left in the care of the nuns of the Madams of the Sacred Heart Convent in New York. It must have seemed to the child a terrible abandonment.

Her family would not return soon.

With a natural feel for engineering problems, Ralph was perfectly suited to his new assignment, commanding an expedition to build the “trans-Alaska military road” from the port of Valdez to the Copper River Valley in the Yukon. In two previous seasons he had already ventured into Prince William Sound, seeking a route into the mineral-rich Yukon territory that didn’t involve traversing foreign (British or Russian) land.

The need for such a route became urgent in 1897 when three to four thousand fortune-seekers poured into the region seeking gold, spurred on by misleading ads of transportation companies. An estimated one hundred men died and scores suffered scurvy, frostbite, snow-blindness and frustrated hopes when gold was not readily found. When the U.S. government tried to send help across Canadian territory, one newspaper reported, “United States troops were not permitted to pass either as an organization or with arms. As a result of that situation the Secretary of War was directed to have an exploration made with a view to establishing the all-American route.”

In April 1898, Ralph Abercrombie left Seattle “with an outfit of 157 Norway reindeer with sleds, equipment, supplies and 113 Laplanders as drivers and herders.” This became known as the Reindeer Train, and the unusual creatures pulled sleds until the snow was gone, and then Ralph was forced to return for pack animals. Horses were found to be the most efficient. While briefly in Seattle on this errand, he complained to a reporter that he regretting missing the action of the Spanish-American war. “I tell you,” he said, “it’s hard luck to be stationed up in Alaska when all this war is going on. My regiment is now down in Mobile, and is likely to go to Cuba anytime, while I have nothing in sight but a winter of hard work in the interior of Alaska. Not a single line of fighting in prospect, unless the Swedes and the Indians start a war.”

But with his horses in tow, the captain headed for Valdez, where he found the stranded miners “in a most pitiable condition, crowded in miserable huts like sardines in a box.” As later reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “There were no facilities for bathing; most of the sufferers had scurvy, and not a few frostbitten hands, faces and feet. The tops of old rubber boots and strips of gunnysacks made shoes and socks for many of them. The stench was intolerable, and 70 percent of the inmates of the huts were mentally deranged.”

Captain Abercrombie, with the blessing of the war department, promptly hired upwards of 300 men, whom he fattened up and employed in starting work on a four-foot wide trail along an estimated 385-mile route to the Copper River Valley.

Lillian and little Francis, as well as the chief engineer’s wife, remained in Valdez while the men threw themselves into their hazardous assignment. Several times Ralph’s life was in danger. In September 1899, when they were eighty miles into the interior of Alaska, Ralph and his men experienced major earthquakes.

“Both shocks came on Sunday,” Ralph later told a reporter, “just a week apart. It was a terrific trembling. We were in a cottonwood grove. Some of the men were badly scared, particularly when the dead trees began to topple over. Great rocks came tumbling down the hillsides, really endangering life. But the grandest sight was that of Mount Wrangel in eruption. We were 150 miles from the lofty peak, yet we could distinctly see her belching forth great volumes of dense black smoke. No doubt she spit fire, too, but the flames we could not see. The smoke was densest and blackest just after the shocks. It was a thrilling scene I assure you.”

The earthquakes caused the Miles glacier to release a mile-long chunk. This created another peril. “We found the icy straits full of submerged ice,” recounted the captain, “and our expedition boat, the Dora, was caught in a floe one night and had a hole smashed in her bow. We signaled by rockets and torchlights, and the Indians built fires ashore, which served as beacons and enabled us to reach shore and beach her. The Indians helped us put in a plug, and then we proceeded down to Juneau…”

Another time, when Ralph was fording a glacial stream on horseback, “officer and beast were turned over and over in it, and could not make the passage…”

Stock were killed by snow slides, officers were stricken snowblind, six feet of snow fell once in five days.

Incessant rain and fog stalled the group at the approach to the Valdez glacier at Bates Pass in July, when Ralph experienced the most desolate night of his twenty-two-years’ service at the Western frontier. “The humidity was so pronounced,” Ralph wrote in a report, “and so continuous that bacon and ham became one mass of mold; the water of crystallization in the sugar being liberated, the sugar wasted away in the form of syrup…”

Horses and men were roped together, twelve miles onto the glacier, as they were pummeled by rain. “The night was black, the rain continuous, and occasionally the mighty glacier would crack as it settled in its passage to the valley below, with a vibration that would cause the men to stop in the tramp, and the horses to quiver with apprehension; then would follow a deafening crash as some thousands of tons of ice detached from one of the hundreds of glaciers that fringe the mountainside would come crashing down on to the main glacier, and bounding from wall to wall of the canyon, the echo would die out down the valley many thousand feet below.”

The journey across the glacier, at a time of year when it was considered impassable, was completed in twenty-nine hours, “without sleep or shelter.”

Hardships notwithstanding, Ralph came to know Alaska like the back of his hand, and for some years he was the only one who extolled the mineral and agricultural possibilities of the Copper River Valley. He praised the black soil that went down to a depth of four to six feet. “Native grasses, berries and flowers are found in great quantities,” he wrote in his government report, “and of a most luxuriant growth. Some of the finest currants I have ever seen grow in the greatest profusion.”

Farmers would find fertile land, he insisted, and miners could harvest gold, copper, silver, cinnabar, galena, quartz, iron, coal, lignite and marble.

Ralph’s efforts paid off. The government responded, the road was built, and 2,600 miles of telegraph line were laid down. The captain was chosen to guide Teddy Roosevelt when the 26th President ventured into the Northwest wilderness to hunt bear.

Still, the officer was more independently minded and less tractable than was good for a military man. Hints of this are found in the news clips. One copper mine owner was quoted as saying, “The talk that is being indulged in against Captain Abercrombie, I should judge, is the result of some differences. Some time ago he had a disagreement with the whaling company. What it was over I am not informed, but he has done wonderful work, no matter what anyone says.”

Another news account referred to a heated conflict between Ralph and an Alaskan post office official. Ralph wrote to government authorities criticizing the fellow, who was called to Washington D.C. “from his distant station,” where he denied the accusations.

The Postmaster General asked Ralph for more information, and his refusal to provide such caused a stir. “He was informed that his position in the matter was unworthy an officer of his reputation and rank, and that his conduct was far from commendable.”

Although this tempest blew over, no one could say that Ralph wasn’t warned of the scandal that would follow some years later.

It was two years before Ralph and Lillian returned to New York to collect their daughter Clara, who had lived from age two to four with the nuns of the Madams of the Sacred Heart Convent.

Ralph advanced in rank to colonel and commanded such promising young Army officers as George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley before moving to Spokane in 1910 and becoming commander of Fort George Wright.

At one point he was punished by being assigned a battalion of black soldiers. These men displayed such professionalism and effectiveness in aiding Spokane police during an I.W.W. labor strike that the city council issued an official resolution expressing its gratitude. Ralph encouraged his men to form an enviable, crack baseball team that whipped all the whites.

One summer, while Clara at age seventeen was touring Europe with her well-to-do classmates, her father’s good fortune was arrested. Labor strikers from town approached the commander for help. Ralph sympathized with the workers and offered them food and supplies. City officials and business owners were scandalized.

“Don’t help the strikers!” they told him.

“I’ll help them if I want to,” responded the colonel.

Not surprisingly, the conflict did not end with angry words alone.

The War Department in Washington D.C. was notified by irate city officials. “Your colonel out here is interfering with Spokane.”

Col. Abercrombie received an order: “You must apologize to Spokane and stop helping these people. It’s none of your business.”

Ralph, the career military man, responded unequivocally. “I’ll be goddamned if I will.”

By the time Clara returned from Europe, her father had been relieved of his command, booted from the Army, and her parents suffered the indignity of being forced to move to a small house on Spokane’s South Hill.
The family was utterly disgraced.