Tragedy and triumph of the Goat Woman — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In Part One of this story, early Ridgeway homesteader Rusty Lancashire met her neighbor, Miriam “The Goat Woman” Mathers, in the spring of 1948 and became her friend. She then mourned Mathers’ death only two years later and watched as Mathers’ meager estate was settled in probate court.

Starting at the End

From the window of her post office along the bluff in Kenai, postmaster Joyce Rheingans noticed a small crowd gathering to peer over the edge toward the beach below. Leaning out her window, Rheingans called to her daughter, Arlene, who was playing with her friend, Evelyn Baktuit, in the Rheingans’ backyard. She instructed Arlene go find out what was happening.

The girls raced over to join the crowd, and, looking down, they saw that there on the beach below lay Miriam Mathers, known to most only by her reputation as a peculiar recluse and by an odd moniker, the old “Goat Woman.”

Mathers was dead.

Standing nearby was the local marshal, Allan Petersen, and an investigation of the death was underway, according to Arlene, who (as Lisa Augustine, her modeling name) wrote years later about the incident in her memoir, “The Dragline Kid.”

Marshal Petersen, whose daughter Peggy had discovered the body and alerted her father, had parked his jeep on the beach and was interrogating the mail carrier from the Libby, McNeil & Libby cannery across the river while his deputy took notes. The mail carrier was supposedly the last person to have seen Mathers alive.

After a short time, the marshal and deputy brought out a gray blanket with a wide black stripe, wrapped Mathers in it, placed the body in the jeep, and drove away.

For many of those standing on the bluff that afternoon of May 26, 1950, it was likely their most prolonged exposure to this unusual woman whom almost no one knew. And that was unfortunate because Miriam Mathers, who had kept to herself and who had lived only briefly in this area, had done something quite extraordinary with her life.

In a covered wagon, and alone except for the company of a small menagerie, Mathers had left a large homestead in Wyoming and made her way to the Kenai Peninsula for a fresh start. She had staked her own homestead near Kenai and had built her own small cabin. She had been seeking gainful employment when she died.

A Final Trip to Town

The day before her demise, Mathers had accepted a ride into Kenai from her younger neighbor, Rusty Lancashire, so she could visit the cannery and see about a job. She’d gotten no work, but the next day she decided to try again.

As she was walking the roadway, along came Al Hershberger, who was working for the Alaska Road Commission and was driving to the ARC main camp in Kenai. He had seen her before and recognized her.

“I stopped and picked her up as we always did to anyone walking down the road,” he said. He remarked that she was “definitely more sickly looking” that day. “She seemed weak in getting into the pickup,” he said, but she “carried on a lively conversation about various things” as they went along.

“When I got to the camp, I let her out and said good bye. She proceeded on down the road; it was about a mile down to the little cannery where she would catch a boat going over to Libby’s. Later that evening I found she had died upon coming back across the river.”

Arlene Rheingans wrote that Mathers had had an interview with the personnel manager and “was turned down because of her advanced age. This made her hopping mad, and she seethed all the way back to our side of the river. Apparently her temper tantrum had triggered a fatal heart attack.”

Hershberger, a Soldotna resident for many decades, disputes this last notion. In her weakened state, he reasoned, Mathers’ anger was likely only a “contributing factor” to her death.

Lancashire didn’t dwell on the cause as much as she did on the effect: “On the Kenai side of the river she kicked the bucket— Heart — with her boots on as she wanted to do.”

Of course, the death of someone so private, a person who lived in the area so briefly and rarely spoke about her personal life, prompted considerable speculation when she was gone.

Lancashire’s youngest daughter, Abby Ala, who then was a young child and now lives on a portion of Mathers’ old homestead, said in 2009 that her mother had talked a bit about Mathers’ past but that the details of those conversations were fuzzy to her after so many years.

Ala thought Mathers might have come originally from California, might have been married and raised daughters, and might have come north alone to escape a possibly abusive relationship.

Hershberger, also in 2009, had had similar notions: “It seemed she was wronged somehow by a man at some point in her life, I think through a bad marriage or something.”

Arlene Rheingans wrote that she’d heard that Mathers had come to Alaska with a husband, both of them arriving shortly after the opening of the Alcan Highway. The husband had died in Alaska, Rheingans thought, so Mathers had gone on to homestead on her own.

In a letter to out-of-state relatives in the late 1940s, Lancashire had written: “She’s really a funny duck. I asked her if she raised a family and tears came to her eyes as she said yes—but she wouldn’t talk about her troubles—so I never tried to pry again.”

Truth of the Matter

As with any combination of rumors, gossip, hearsay and guesswork, there’s just enough truth to make the story seem plausible. There are also enough inaccuracies to make people wonder whether the real story can ever be uncovered.

The fact is that some holes still remain in the Miriam Mathers’ story, but much more of the truth has been revealed.

To begin with, Mathers hailed from Nebraska, not California. She had been married but had come to Alaska alone. She had had several children but had outlived them all. And she had, indeed, died with her boots on — metaphorically and literally.

Miriam Henriette Davidson was born in the village of Eustis in Frontier County, Nebraska, on June 25, 1883. She was the third child born to Arthur Middleton Davidson and Ellen Marie (Burnell) Davidson. The first child, Cora, had been born in 1880. When the last child, Paul, was born in 1900, there were 11 siblings.

According to family lore from at least two great-grandchildren who sprang from these myriad brothers and sisters, Arthur Middleton Davidson was not a particularly nice man, but scant evidence exists to prove it. In 1914, while in McAlester, Oklahoma, he sued Ellen for divorce and for custody of their three minor children still living with her in Nebraska.

Arthur was quoted in the McAlester News-Capital as saying that it was never too late for a man to “wish he was single again.” He charged Ellen with “desertion,” claiming that she had left him on Feb. 19, 1912. Family lore has it that he wanted out of Nebraska, and Ellen didn’t want to go.

It appears that Ellen kept the younger children and at least a good portion of the family farm, which she sold in 1923, the year before Arthur married a widow named Nancy Angeline Leiby, accepting her kids as his step-children and spending the remaining 11 years of his life with her in Fort Collins, Colorado. Ellen lived with her grown children in Nebraska and then in Oregon, where she died 10 years after Arthur.

By the time of her parents’ split, Miriam was working as a registered nurse in Des Moines, Iowa. She had begun nursing training at Iowa Methodist Hospital in 1905, graduating from the three-year program in May 1908, the year before her younger sister Mabel.

The sisters lived and worked in Des Moines for several years. By 1915, Miriam was a nursing supervisor at the Methodist Hospital, but her life changed dramatically two years after that.

On Dec. 2, 1917, Miriam, then 34 years old, married a farmer named Thomas Joachim Mathers in Lexington, Nebraska. From that time until she began her quest for Alaska in 1939, she appears to have completely abandoned her nursing career — a sacrifice not uncommon for women of that era.

Miriam moved with Thomas to Heartwell, Nebraska, and began having babies. Rather than being known as Miss Miriam Davidson, R.N., she became Mrs. T. J. Mathers.

Her life as a mother was filled with tragedy.

TO BE CONTINUED….