Wild Goose Bill's Will: A Ferry, Five Dollars, and a Murder
The Columbia River ferryman leaves his boat to one son, $5.50 to another, and the rest to the son the paper calls an 'imbecile' — while the disappearance of a rival is quietly laid at his door.
Wild Goose Bill Condon in his will gave to his son George Wild Goose Bill's ferry on the Columbia river; to his son Wiley, $5.50. He gave the rest of the estate to his crippled son Charles, the imbecile. On the death of Charles Condon the property is to go to the Wilbur public school fund.
It is not true that Bill had killed fifteen Indians. The number was five. It is believed that he murdered Frank Abbott, who disappeared from the ferry last spring. Bill was jealous of Abbott's attentions to Millie Dunn, Bill's mistress, on whose account Bill was at last killed.
“It is not true that Bill had killed fifteen Indians. The number was five.”
Wild Goose Bill Condon was a genuine frontier legend on the upper Columbia — a ferryman, saloon keeper and suspected killer whose name outlived him. Note how casually the item corrects the record: not fifteen Indians, only five. That sentence is the whole history of Indigenous dispossession compressed into a shrug, and it should be read as evidence, not colour. The ferry itself is gone, swallowed by dams and highways, but the county seat and the school fund it endowed still carry the name of the man who ran it.
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