Troy L. Parker, a visitor from Dartmouth College in the summer of 1909, was staying with the Trasks, a staid lumber family with a liberal supply of comely and virtuous young daughters. His first day in Deadwood young Parker went out to look over the town, and having vaguely heard, as far away as Chicago, of the Green Front as a place of entertainment, he devoted his youthful but unsuccessful energies to trying to find that recreational establishment. At dinner that evening, when Mrs. Trask hospitably inquired what he had done all afternoon, he guilelessly replied that he had “been looking for the Green Front,” and at that a pause, indeed a coldness, fell upon the conversation as Mrs. Trask wondered how she could hope to protect her innocent daughters from this open and admitted viper who confessed that he had spent his first day in Deadwood searching for the town’s most famous whorehouse.
Dad never did find the Green Front – that wasn’t his line of work, anyway – but he did ride a horse clear down to Custer, where he put up at the Kleeman House. In the morning he noticed a sheet of boiler plate under his bed – put there by a thoughtful management to keep bullets from the bar beneath from injuring the sleeper. The next day he rode on down to Hot Springs and its famous plunge, and visited with the family of Congressman Martin, with whom his father had some political acquaintance, and whose son Paul was a Dartmouth friend of Dad’s. From this visit onward Dad was a Westerner, a fan of the lore and the legends and the lies of the great American West, and his love of the West deeply colored his life thereafter.
Troy La Salle Parker (the Troy came from an Irish ancestor who came to the Galena lead mines in the early 1840’s; the La Salle was for a French Huguenot ancestor who came to Virginia about 1720) was born in 1889 on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. His father was an eminent patent attorney, a state senator and a driving man with many financial interests, one of which led him to carry his wife, his four young boys, and his crippled mother-in-law to Europe in 1897. The boys attended school and had a German governess in Berlin – their house there eventually became a Nazi headquarters – and then the Closelet School in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dad demonstrated an early talent for commerce by lending money at ruinous interest to the improvident English boys at the school – this was regarded as a heinous crime, usurious and immoral, but these strictures did not deter Dad from later having a good deal to do with the small loan business. To the end of their lives the four Parker brothers would converse among themselves interchangeably in English, French and German.
In Berlin they had several memorable experiences. They spent an entire day dealing with the bureaucracy trying to get permission to fire off fireworks to celebrate the 4th of July; when this permission was finally and grudgingly granted they were allowed to touch off a few feeble lady-fingers, but only in the presence of a fireman and a police officer. They were also well trained in courtesies: one day in Berlin when Prince Henry drove by in his carriage the four little boys bowed most ceremoniously, and the genial Prince, of whom we will hear more later, most formally saluted them in return.
When they returned to the United States they were one day riding a train on which Theodore Roosevelt was a passenger. Dad’s father, Francis W. Parker, knew him and took the four boys to meet him. The famous and pugnacious Roosevelt asked them to demonstrate French boxing – the infamous tirer la savate which was an early version of Kung Fu – and Roosevelt much disapproved of this ungentlemanly sport and demonstrated American boxing to them, until Dad smote the Vice President on the nose and the lesson came to an untimely end.
After that Dad’s education was a bit less successful. He attended Morgan Park Academy in Chicago, a liberally-inclined and purposely undisciplined school run by the famous educator, John Dewey. Dad distinguished himself mainly by blowing a fire escape off one of the buildings with some industrial-strength firecrackers which his evil elder brother Frank had provided for this activity. After he was expelled from Morgan Park, he was sent to Todd School at Woodstock, Illinois, an institution strictly run by a retired Indian-fighting cavalryman, where more sensible discipline forced Dad to settle down, distinguish himself at least in debate and Bible study, and mind his books somewhat better. He went to the University of Chicago’s high school (his father being a trustee of the University – he might not have got in otherwise) where he edited the school’s newspaper. Dad also, in concert with Paul Harper, son of the President of the University, went into business shining shoes around the campus. When Prince Henry of Germany visited Chicago his eye lit upon a news item describing this youthful commercial venture, and when the Prince was introduced to President Harper he inquired of him if it was customary, in the United States, from the sons of university Presidents to add to the family income by shining other people’s shoes. Harper at once closed down this heretofore prosperous venture. Dad went on to Dartmouth College where he barely squeaked by, his first year, but he soon settled down, edited the College’s daily newspaper, put on the first of the famous Dartmouth Winter Carnivals, and was graduated in 1911 with a degree in economics.
After college Dad went to work at the Rumley Tractor factory, at first assembling tractors, later as a timekeeper, and then as a bill collector for the company in the Ozarks, where he learned words, pithy phrases, and songs enough to distinguish him for a lifetime. He was never a profane or vulgar man, but these experiences equipped him with a vocabulary of pungent expression which now and then made the air around him smoke and crackle as he addressed himself to vexing problems or vexatious people.
Returning to Chicago he had a small but thriving business making and selling photographic light meters, and he joined the National Guard, serving in the 1st Illinois Cavalry as regimental quartermaster Sergeant. In 1916 this unit was called to active duty and sent to Brownsville, Texas, to aid in the pursuit of the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. Fortunately, they didn’t catch him, but here, too, Dad absorbed a fund of sulphurous language which throughout his life proved to be an aid and comfort to him.
When the United States entered World War I the unit was again called to active duty, and converted to artillery. Dad at this time married his father’s niece and next-door neighbor, Janet Watson Smith, in 1917; they were happily married for sixty years. The military powers that be decided that each artillery unit should have an observation balloon, and Dad was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to train as an observer. As he reported to the Commandant, there was a frightful roar outside. “That,” said the Commandant, “was our last balloon; you are now an aerial observer in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps.” And so Dad was. When we took him to visit Fort Sill in the 1960’s nothing was familiar to him, until we got to the air field, where every hill and valley had its memories and terrors. He did not like flying. Once, while in the air, one side of the wing fell off, and only extraordinary skill on the pilot’s part managed to spin the aircraft slowly down to safety. Dad always claimed that in his eventual unit, the 101st Aero Squadron, only three of the original flying cadre survived the War: half of them killed in training in the U.S., the rest killed on routine patrol in France, flights on which they never saw a German plane or came under German fire: those flying orange crates simply fell apart. Dad probably survived the War because he was sent on detached duty to be Commandant of Flying Officers at Camp Dix, Texas where he introduced some 1,200 rebellious and unwilling pilots to proper military discipline and behavior.
Once the war ended, Dad was riding in a flimsy French passenger train when a more sturdy American engine plowed into the end of it, and passed through the entire train. Every man in Dad’s compartment was killed, except Dad, who as a flier had been taught that “when a crash is coming, roll into a ball. You probably won’t live, anyway, but you’ll make a prettier corpse.” Given his flying experience, and this ghastly train wreck, Dad always felt that he was living on borrowed time, that sooner or later some accident was going to get him.
Back from the war Dad went into a variety of businesses: refrigeration, small loans, oil-burning stoves, aluminum pots and pans. Dad’s experience as a bill collector in the Ozarks had led him to believe, correctly, that the average man would pay his bills. He thus felt able to underwrite much of the Club Aluminum company’s installment debt on expensive pots and pans – a service for which the company liberally rewarded him – for without this endorsement the banks would not advance credit on such tenuous security as personal loans. In the wild 1920’s, he speculated on the stock market, in which he made – and lost – a fortune. I can remember him yet on the day of the great crash in October of 1929. He had borrowed heavily to speculate and the stock market crash just about wiped him out.
His small loan business sucked him willynilly into the gang wars in Chicago. I could never tell which side he was on or if the tale as I have it was true, but more or less by accident he disposed of two of the opposition gangsters, and I have always felt that just maybe this was one of the reasons that he moved away from Chicago into the Black Hills. I do know that he kept every gun in the house loaded, and a cartridge in its chamber. I asked him, once, if this wasn’t dangerous, and he replied, “Wattie, if I ever have to shoot somebody I don’t want to have to fool around.”
During his days of wealth and prosperity he and his brothers and several friends had joined in building summer homes in Palmer Gulch some four miles southeast of Hill City, in these Black Hills. They laid out the magnificent Black Hills Country Club, with a nine-hole golf course, built four cabins for themselves, five cabins for visitors and guests, housing for the help, and working buildings generally. When the Great Depression came along, this collapsed country club was about all that Dad had left. He gradually bought out the other partners, and in time turned the Black Hills Country Club into Palmer Gulch Lodge, a semi-dude ranch which the family ran until 1962.
I remember many of the trials of the business. Dad’s partner in the oil stove business kept inflicting on him oil-burning water heaters, to try out. They went out; I don’t suppose there was a day that somebody didn’t have to rush out to drain and relight a few of them. They were a constant bane and burden, but they were free and Dad thought he understood them.
Francis Fabian and Dibrell Hynes, mining engineers and early partners in the country club, had assured Dad that a spirally-wound, tar-coated three-inch steel pipe could successfully bring water a mile and a quarter to the business. The tar flaked off in the winter, the pipes rusted, and for years somebody – usually me – had to walk the whole length of that accursed pipe line putting toothpicks into the constantly appearing holes.
Dad was always careful about who he would let stay at Palmer Gulch Lodge – guests, in his opinion, had to be congenial, and although we now and then had some weird ones for the most part Dad’s care in this matter assured happy and ongoing conversations up on the Lodge terrace as the sun went down on Harney Peak and Elkhorn Mountain. I don’t suppose we had more than one or two sour balls with us in any summer.
Dad was one of the founders of the Hill City Rotary Club, in 1939, and the string of doctors, lawyers and professors and other notables who came to the Lodge assured the Rotary Club of a constant supply of excellent speakers: the President of the National Rifle Society (that was Dad’s brother Frank), the man who invented Scotch tape, the head of International Harvester’s operations in Russia, all come to mind. Before the War he even tried to get Admiral Halsey to speak but that worthy wouldn’t do it.
It was a wonderful way of life, except for the lack of money in the enterprise, and it kept us here in these Hills which we all love so well and meeting people whose company we enjoyed.. Even the lack of income from the business was somewhat offset by Dad’s three brothers, who having gone into the family patent law offices, succeeded in extracting a huge award from the federal government for infringing on the patents of the oil-burning stoves in which Dad had a minor interest.
As long as he lived Dad accumulated a library of Western lore – it’s now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, where I taught Western American history for 21 years – and his interest in the West grew with his studies. In about 1944 he, and his brothers Frank, Norman and Leslie became enthusiastic members of the first Corral of Westerners, brought into that new organization by their acquaintance with Leland Case, an eminent journalist, and brother of South Dakota’s Senator Francis Case. Other founders were Don Russell, who reviewed thousands of Western books for the Chicago newspapers, and Ray Allen Billington, a notable professor of Western American history at Northwestern University. The Westerners prospered as you know – we now have over 100 corrals all over the world – and in 1951 Dad was amongst the founders of this Black Hills Corral, at its initial meeting (Bob Lee and I were there!) at Loockehaven, the home of the Reverend Carl Loocke of Keystone.
There is something about the American West that has a universal appeal. All over the world our Frontier grips the human imagination. The West is a land of adventure, opportunity, good luck and hard work. The fur trade, the mines, the stagecoaches and railroad, the lumber mills, cattlemen and the cowboys, the Indians, the Army, the homesteaders and the businessmen who seized these opportunities have within them an appeal to everyone; we are all Westerners at heart; and everybody loves a cowboy. Dad was one of those who lived and helped to preserve the glories of this glorious frontier, the Frontier of human hopes and possibilities, the West which will live on as long as we cherish and remember it.
SOURCES
Francis W. Parker, Alma Chapman Parker: In Memoriam, Chicago, Illinois, The Parker Family Council, 1913.
Floyd Beverly Bolton, Pedigree of Henry Hardin Sallee, Hammond, Indiana, privately published, 1974.
Troy L. Parker, edited by Watson Parker, Memoirs, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, privately published, 1977.
Norman Sallee Parker, edited by Olga G. Parker, For My Grandchildren, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, privately published, 1984.
Leslie Monroe Parker, “An Irishman Born” (About William Troy), unpublished manuscript, undated.
Personal Profiles from ‘Leven Up, Dartmouth Class of 1911, “Troy L. Parker,” Privately published, no place, no date, but 1966.
Watson Parker, “The Happy Valley: Palmer Gulch and Its Famous Lodge,” Dakota History Conference, 2 April 1982.
Watson Parker, “Palmer Gulch, 1875 – 1991: The History of a Black Hills Valley,” Dakota History Conference, 1 June 1991.
Watson Parker, The Palmer Gulch Lodge Guide to the Black Hills (privately published, 1952, 1954, 1958).
“Troy La Salle Parker,” in Pennington County History Book Committee’s A History of Pennington County SD, no place, no date, ca. 1987.