The Wild Life and Vanishing Legacy of Betsy Jones

The celebrated Betsy Jones case is a suit affecting property to the value of several hundred thousand dollars. The action is brought by the Bellingham Bay Land Company against Carrai Dibble to quiet title to half the Jones donation claim, which lies in the city just back of the Sehome schoolhouse. Betsy was born Betsy Blackhouse at Hanley, England. In her younger days, she lived with a toll gate keeper. Tom Jones, a miner, lived with a woman—name unknown. In 1851, a man named Robinson started a colony from Hanley to Nanaimo, and only married women were permitted to embark. So love smote Tom and Betsy on that glad spring morning; they sailed the seas together. Betsy's old man, the toll gate keeper, suicided the day after Betsy left for Nanaimo. The Joneses eventually came to Whatcom, and Betsy took up the land in dispute. Betsy and Tom were neither one of them extravagantly true to one another. Finally, they separated, Betsy running off to Fort York with a man named Murphy, where she lived until Murphy died. She then found a new lover in whose arms she died in 1867. Captain Eldridge later bought the donation claim of Betsy for $100, and the deed was signed by Tom Jones as attorney in fact for Betsy. The case turns upon the existence of a power of attorney which is not of record. Attorney Black recently went to England and procured deeds from those who purported to be Betsy's heirs—a sister who had three husbands and who mistook the attorney for Thomas Jones and desired to carve him up with a butcher knife. Betsy, it seems, had many heirs who were like prairie chickens in a river bottom hay meadow—hard to get at, but finally flushed. The case is an important one and will undoubtedly be taken to the supreme court.