booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Robert Moore, his son James and Medorem Crawford
denounced the move as “a vile injustice” to McLoughlin, who had assisted thousands of
Oregon emigrants. Standing 6-4, “with a dramatic mop of white hair and imperious eyes,”
McLoughlin was called “the white-headed eagle” by the Indians. In their later years, he
and Robert Moore often savored a glass of wine from Moore’s aerie overlooking the
meandering Willamette. They died a few days apart in 1857.
* * *
In 1846 Joe Meek was elected to the provisional Oregon legislature. With Congress
still dragging its heels, the lawmakers dispatched the mountain man to Washington, D.C.,
to press Oregon’s case for territoryhood. Meek had the wilderness know-how to make it
there in one piece, as well as boundless chutzpah and promising connections. President
James K. Polk’s wife, Sarah Childress Polk, was his cousin. Arriving in tattered trapper’s
regalia, including a wolfskin cap and jaunty red sash, and cheekily billing himself as “Envoy
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Oregon to the Court of
the United States,” Meek headed straight to the White House. The president greeted him
warmly and insisted that he stay at the mansion. Meek demurred, but the president sent
for the First Lady to persuade him. “When I heard the silks rustling in the passage,” Meek
remembered years later, “I felt more frightened than if a hundred Blackfeet had whopped
in my ear. A mist came over my eyes, and when Mrs. Polk spoke to me I couldn’t think of
anything to say in return.” The mountain man soon was the talk of the town.
Great Britain and the U.S. finally compromised on a boundary at the 49 th parallel
and Oregon became a territory in 1848, with Joe Meek as its first U.S. marshal. In 1853 its
northern half became “Washington.”
Booth Gardner’s maternal grandfather, Laurence S. Booth, a history buff, told a
Works Progress Administration historian in the 1930s that Robert Moore and Joe Meek
were related. Proof has proven elusive, but if a dash of whimsy doesn’t hurt history, Booth
Gardner could make a case that he’s a shirt-tail relative to President Polk. It is no stretch,
however, for him to boast that he is a direct descendant of pioneers who helped put in
motion the forces that in due course created the very state he was elected to lead 141
years later.
* * *
Also worthy of more note is Ronald C. Crawford, Booth Gardner’s maternal greatgrandfather.
After serving in the Washington Territorial Legislature (1875-77), he was
named superintendent of the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island. Two years later, the
family moved to Seattle, where he became a securities broker. In the 1880s he handled
circulation for the fledgling Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His son, Samuel Leroy Crawford,
“who never knows what it is to be tired,” had been assistant clerk of the Territorial House
and an apprentice printer on the pioneer Washington Standard at Olympia. Sam, who was
Booth Gardner’s great-uncle, joined The Daily Intelligencer as a 21-year-old pressman three
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