booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

weeks after its first issue in the summer of 1876 and also covered sports. Sam’s passionate
pastime was baseball. He organized Seattle’s first amateur team, the Alkis, and was hailed
as “one of the best amateur players on the sound.” Booth Gardner’s grandfather, Laurence
Booth, was a teammate. They were to become brothers-in-law.
Sam Crawford and Thomas Prosch, another pioneer newspaperman, bought The
Daily Intelligencer in 1879, and in 1881 merged it with the faltering Post to create the
Post-Intelligencer, which was quickly dubbed “the P-I” by staff and readers alike. Crawford
shortly thereafter sold his interest in the paper but stayed on as city editor.
Booth Gardner’s Great-Uncle Sam left newspapering in 1888 and made a fortune
in real estate. Together with another hustling former P-I employee, Charles T. Conover, he
launched Crawford & Conover, whose first-year property sales amounted to $1.25 million.
The firm platted much of northwest King County and also sold fire insurance. Spending
heavily and creatively on regional and national advertising, Crawford & Conover in 1890
published and distributed 50,000 copies of a handsome 60-page booklet, “Washington
the Evergreen State and Seattle, its Metropolis.” Their preface noted, “In the title we have
sought to give the new commonwealth its most appropriate soubriquet – ‘The Evergreen
State.’ ” It stuck, and two former printer’s devils soon found themselves with one hell
of a lot of money. They split $50,000 in commissions that year. Sam Crawford promptly
financed “the first real (professional) baseball club in Seattle,” the Reds.
As a boy, Sam Crawford had learned Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trade language, and
later picked up key phrases in the Lushootseed language. Chief Seattle’s eldest daughter,
“Princess Angeline,” who took in laundry and sold baskets on the streets of Seattle,
counted Crawford as one of her advisers – a “tillicum.” After she died in 1896, Crawford
campaigned for Seattle schoolchildren to donate their pennies to erect a monument over
her grave. “He appealed to children rather than adults in the hope that contributing to
this fund would make them feel linked in some measure to the early history of their city.”
In 1911, pioneer historian Clinton A. Snowden concluded that Sam Crawford’s life “has
reflected honor upon his sturdy ancestors who braved all the dangers and suffered all the
privations of the remote West to make possible the rich inheritance of their posterity.”
* * *
Laurence Stephen Booth, the governor’s maternal grandfather, was the son of
Manville Stephen and Mary Roe Booth. He was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, on March
26, 1861, just before his father’s departure for Washington Territory. Mary Booth “was
born in England in 1833 of English and Irish parentage.” She followed the same route to the
Northwest that Manville had taken – by merchant ship from New York, down the Atlantic
Coast and around to Panama. Now, however, the Civil War was raging. The ship that had
departed just prior was waylaid by the famous Confederate sloop of war Alabama. It
bagged dozens of Union merchant ships and sank or burned all but a few. Mary Booth’s
ship somehow eluded the blockade. At Panama, Mary and the children crossed the Isthmus
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