booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

horses, mules, and cattle. The newcomers tipped the balance of power in the Willamette
Valley to the Americans. Robert Moore’s experience in the Missouri Legislature in 1830
proved invaluable. A committee he headed produced a remarkable document that was “in
essence Oregon’s first written constitution.”
* * *
Ronald C. Crawford was a carpenter whose skills were immediately in demand
in Oregon. But when gold was discovered in California in 1848 the 22-year-old saddled
up and joined the mass exodus south. Panning the rivers near Sacramento from sunup
to sundown, he struck it rich, extracting $100 to $250 worth of gold a day. Many of the
“49ers” came home with $30,000 to $40,000 and promptly squandered their fortunes
on orgies of “profligacy and waste.” Crawford was a frugal family man. He returned to
Oregon City in 1852, married 16-year-old Elizabeth Jane Moore, Booth Gardner’s greatgrandmother,
and started farming. Carpentry began as a side business but soon led to a
successful contracting partnership. The years to come found Crawford and his growing
family in Tumwater where he manufactured furniture. In 1870 he took up a homestead
on “fine land” in the Lincoln Creek area along the Chehalis River in Lewis County. Booth
Gardner’s grandmother, Nelle, the sixth of the Crawfords’ seven children, was born there in
1876. Her father was elected to the Territorial Legislature from Lewis County and served in
the House of Representatives during the Fifth Biennial Session, 1875-77. The Assembly, as
it was then known, called for a constitutional convention and petitioned for statehood. The
legislators were paid $4 a day during session.
Nelle’s brother, Ronald Marcus Crawford, was the court crier at the King County
Courthouse in the 1880s. He became friends with the county auditor, Manville S. Booth.
* * *
The Booths, industrious Irish Catholics, got to Washington Territory before the
Gardners – perhaps to escape ethnic and religious prejudice, only to see their name
besmirched by guilt by association with an assassin.
Manville Booth, a farmer, arrived in 1861 from Battle Creek, Michigan. He established
a farm and cattle ranch near the sawmill town of Port Discovery between Sequim and Port
Townsend. Two years later he sent for his English-born wife, Mary Roe Booth, and three
young children, including Booth Gardner’s grandfather, Laurence Stephen Booth, who was
2. Reunited, the young family settled in on the homestead. In 1865, however, when news
of President Lincoln’s assassination by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth reached
the Olympic Peninsula, “a severe prejudice arose” against Manville Booth in the small
community even though he explained repeatedly that he was no relation to the loathsome
killer. Booth moved his family to Port Ludlow, then to Port Townsend, where he proved to be
so upstanding that the fallout dissipated. Booth prospered in both cattle ranching and real
estate, also doing business in Seattle. He moved his family there in 1872.
Personable and public-spirited, Manville Booth was elected King County Auditor
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