The Daughters Who Hauled Telephone Poles to Pay for School
W. J. Whiting sued Lindsley Bros. over $350 worth of telephone poles cut on his Pend Oreille ranch; his daughters testified they drove horses and dragged the poles to the river after their father promised them the sale money for school.
W. J. Whiting, suing Lindsley Bros. for $350 on an alleged sale of telephone poles from his ranch on the Pend Oreille River, put his two daughters on the stand to show that the poles had been cut. Both testified that they worked at getting the poles to the river because their father had promised them the money he got from their sale to go to school on. The evidence did not show whether they went to school without waiting for the bill to be paid. Judge W. A. Huneke and a jury are hearing the case. Whiting alleges he was to pile the logs on the river bank and that it was done. Then high water washed some of them away before the purchasers came for them. Daisy Whiting, now 15 years old, testified that she drove the horses that pulled the poles from the woods, except in the cases of the larger poles, which her brother looked after. Her sister, now Mrs. D. W. Reisler, also testified to helping with the poles. They were gotten out of the woods in 1907.—Spokesman-Review. The jury returned a verdict for $350 in favor of Whiting.
“Both testified that they worked at getting the poles to the river because their father had promised them the money he got from their sale to go to school on.”
The Whiting case shows how rural households relied on children's labor and on informal promises of pay. More than a century later, Washington still debates farmworker wages, unpaid family work, and who absorbs losses when weather destroys a harvest—or a pile of telephone poles.
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