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THE CROSBYS

Like unto a saga of old, runs the story of the coming of the Crosby family into the West.

— Mrs. George E. Blankenship (1914) ¹

By the time the Harrigans left Canada, the Crosbys had earned distinction in America, initially as seafarers based in New England. They made history sailing around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest. Mrs. Blankenship could not contain her enthusiasm in the chapter she devoted to the family’s accomplishments in her Early History of Thurston County, Washington. “In all the wild experiences related during the compilation of this book,” she wrote, “none were more picturesque and interesting than the history of an entire family of stalwart sons and fair daughters with their aged but sturdy father, coming with their own ship, laden with their own goods, their children and themselves, to take their part in conquering the wilderness.” ²

In focusing on Washington State, she traced the Crosbys only as far back as the 1840s, when the illustrious Captain Nathaniel Crosby spurred and pioneered the territory. Larry Crosby’s genealogy dove centuries deeper into the paternal line, back to “Vikings and Catholics” who settled in Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. ³ Crosby is a Danish name, meaning “town of the cross” (Cros is a transposition of the Danish kors and by is a diminutive of the Danish burg).In his account, written with mock lofty diction and printed in faux Old English type, the first recorded Crosbys were of the Irish house of Ardfert, notably the Right Reverend John Crosbie, appointed bishop of Ardfert in 1601. The family spread out over western and middle Ireland to Kerry and Queens, as far north as Tyrone (home to a knight, Sir Pierce Crosby) and as far south as Cork, where the Harrigans also settled.

The family’s conversion to Anglicism was coerced during the reign of Henry VIII and was eventually fully embraced. Edmundus Crosby served the king as cantorist at St. John’s in Doncaster, and Richard Crosby did likewise as auditor of St. John’s in York. ⁴ The first in the line to reach the New World, in 1635, was Simon, who bought a homestead in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through marriage, Simon’s progeny aligned the family twice over with descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims, who preceded him by fifteen years.

In 1755 Deacon Nathaniel Crosby married into the brood of Elder William Brewster, a Mayflower alumnus whose family founded Brewster, Massachusetts, where many Crosbys lived until the early nineteenth century. ⁵ A generation later his grandson, Captain Nathaniel Crosby, the first in the family’s line of sea captains, married Ruby Foster, who traced her ancestry to another noted Mayflower passenger, Governor Winslow. Those ties earned Bing membership in the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. But Bing neglected to mention those relations in his 1953 as-told-to autobiography, Call Me Lucky, preferring to concentrate on the outstanding men of the sea.

Yet, as Larry discovered, several Crosbys “distinguished themselves in the learned professions and as military leaders in the Revolutionary War.” Josiah Crosby, inadvertently overlooked by Larry, signed a declaration of the Continental Congress in Amherst in 1776 as a representative of New Hampshire. ⁶ The family’s most celebrated colonial, however, was Enoch Crosby, who joined the Continental Army at twelve as a spy and claimed to be the model for Harvey Birch, the undercover hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s bestselling 1821 novel, The Spy. Cooper testily denied Crosby’s claim: “I know nothing of such a man as Enoch Crosby, never having heard his name, until I saw it coupled with the character of the Spy, after my return from Europe.” ⁷ But on the evening C. P. Clinch’s adaptation of the novel opened at New York’s Park Theater (not ten weeks after the book was first published), Enoch appeared in his box to “thunders of applause.” ⁸ Cooper admitted he based his story on an anecdote told to him by Governor John Jay and subsequently conceded he never learned the name of the spy, because “Jay felt himself bound to secrecy.” ⁹ It is known that Jay arranged for Enoch Crosby to enlist as a spy in the British army, and that Enoch refused, Birch-like, his offer of a reward.

Whether Crosby was the prototype for Birch (who exemplifies for Cooper’s General Washington “the patriotism that pervades the bosoms of [our] lowest citizens”), the twentieth-century Crosbys were proud to claim a hero of low estate, even as they vouched themselves two coats of arms. Somewhat defensively, Larry explained that heraldry “does not denote an aristocratic class, but rather personal merit secured by the humblest as well as the highest.” The motto of their Irish arms — depicting two hands, a lion, and three swords— is Indignante Invidia Florebit Justus (Despising envy, the just shall flourish). The English arms display three rams and the motto Liberty Under Thy Guidance, the Guidance of the Lamb of God. Bing preferred the Irish emblem, sporting it on the breast pockets of his blazers.

Captain Nathaniel, known as Nathaniel Jr. or Nathaniel II, was the fourth Crosby of that name in a line that produced three or four more. ¹⁰ Born in 1810, in East Brewster, Massachusetts, he and his brothers, Clanrick and Alfred, were tutored in the seaman’s life by their father, who commanded a vessel out of Cape Cod. In his twenties, Nathaniel moved to Wiscasset, Maine, where he married Mary Lincoln and raised a family. By 1844 his reputation for daring had earned him a commission from a U.S. government agent to command the brig O. C. Raymond, charged with taking emergency supplies from Boston to immigrants who poured into the Oregon Territory seeking their fortunes. Reaching the mouth of the Columbia River, he continued to Portland, an outpost of log cabins, and put his crew ashore to build a warehouse for his cargo. That cabin survived as the settlement’s post office.

Crosby took to the community, enchanted by the vitality of the frontier and the commercial promise it held, discerning for himself a role amid the burgeoning industries and direct trade routes to Hawaii — still known as the Sandwich Islands — and China. He decided to transport his family and made one last visit to New England to outline his plan. Over the next few years, Captain Crosby traded along the West Coast and Hawaii, ferrying supplies at government behest to secure the territory and earning enough money to enable his brothers to purchase the Grecian, a 247-ton brig. In September 1849, with twenty-four people on board, all but five of them relatives, the Grecian left New York. ¹¹ Clanrick and Alfred served as captain and second officer. On board were their wives, children, in-laws, housekeeper, and their retired father, Captain Nathaniel Crosby Sr.

Within five months the Crosby brig rounded the Horn and docked in Portland. The party continued to the small settlement of Tumwater. That town, incorporated three years earlier, consisted of little more than a blockhouse and a few one-room cabins. It became home to Clanrick and his family. In partnership with a man named Gray, Clanrick bought a gristmill and land along the river, eventually building a general store and emerging as a prominent citizen, a leader and philanthropist. His father also lived there a couple of years but returned to Cape Cod shortly before his death. Alfred moved his family to Astoria, Oregon.

The man responsible for the emigration, Captain Nathaniel Crosby Jr., soon tired of sedentary life. Early in 1852 he transported his family — and the first cargo of spars (poles used in the rigging of ships) ever sent from the Pacific Coast — to China. After establishing a home in Hong Kong, he returned for a second consignment of spars, this time from Olympia, the growing settlement at Tumwater’s northern border, soon to be designated capital of Washington Territory. He died in Hong Kong four years later, leaving a widow; two daughters, Mary and Martha; and a son, Nathaniel. All but Martha quickly returned to Tumwater. ¹²

Clanrick helped young Nat get on his feet, selling him a parcel of land at Tumwater’s north end and employing him at the mill. Nat took a wife, Cordelia, and prospered for a time, building a spacious, two-story A-frame house with a small cherry orchard out front. But a bad investment in steamships annihilated his savings, and he was forced to relocate to Olympia, where he found employment as postmaster. (Although they lived in the Tumwater house only a few years, it continued to be known as “the old Crosby home,” and in 1949 the deed was given to the local chapter of Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington in return for its restoration and preservation. ¹³ Bing contributed $1,800 toward the purchase and gave the Daughters two chairs his grandparents had owned when they lived in the house.) Nat and Cordelia raised two sons. Frank Lawrence, born in Tumwater in 1862, made a name for himself in the Puget Sound area as U.S. deputy marshall residing in Tacoma, thirty miles northeast; his brother, Harry Lowe, born in Olympia on November 28, 1870, developed a less exacting attitude toward life.

Given the eight-and-a-half-year gap between the births of Frank and Harry, each may be said to have been raised virtually as an only child, but it was the younger who became a provincial dandy. Pampered by servants throughout his childhood, Harry was by all accounts a guileless young man, lighthearted and informal, unburdened by ambition, hail-fellow-well-met — in short, a model for the character Bing Crosby would bring to movies in the 1930s. He was appealing in a ruddy, moonfaced way, favoring broad suspenders and a rakishly tilted straw hat, and he loved music. Accompanying himself on mandolin or a four-string guitar, Harry sang old favorites made popular by roving minstrel troupes, newer novelty songs and ballads, Chinese ditties learned from the Asian servants his mother had brought home from the Orient, and Gilbert and Sullivan. The Mikadowas the rage of the 1890s, and a cousin of Harry’s, Sam Woodruff, famously toured the Northwest as Koko.

Harry sang with an Olympia-based men’s choir, the Peep-O’-Day Boys, and played in the city’s silver cornet band at about the time Kate Harrigan was singing in a Tacoma church choir. In 1890, after dropping out of college, Harry moved to Tacoma, where Frank lived, and found work as a bookkeeper for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s Land Department. For three years he lived in a string of hotels and rooming houses, but his bachelor days were numbered when he encountered the stabilizing glint-eyed gaze of Miss Harrigan appearing in a department-store theatrical.

From the first, they seemed oddly matched, a devout Catholic courted by a casual Protestant. Kate was a willful, disciplined young woman who distrusted luck and abhorred sloth. Harry was incapable of raising his voice and trusted less to Providence or God than to goodwill and serendipity. In time, she would come to be characterized as humorless, even autocratic. He never lost the epithet earned as a young man, Happy Harry — though it was amended much later to Hollywood Harry. The women employed in Bing Crosby’s offices were more bemused than offended by Dad Crosby’s fanny-pinching, in light of Mother Crosby’s temperament, which brought everyone, including her sons, to solemn attention.

Music may have sealed their courtship, but Harry’s willingness to convert to Catholicism made possible their marriage. He established a standard other non-Catholics would be expected to uphold as a precondition to marrying into the family. The wedding took place in a small wooden church, Holy Rosary, on January 4, 1894, and the couple moved directly into the hotel — St. John House — in which Harry boarded. Within weeks they acquired their first of several houses in the alphabetically configured city. Located in the “backwoods” area of N Street, ¹⁴ this house came to Kate’s mind fifty years later when a writer solicited her Mother’s Day recollections. “One of my warmest Mother’s Day memories goes back to before the children were even born,” she said, “back to the day when their father and I knew we had established a home for them, a place warm and livable, and I could close my eyes and imagine them there.” ¹⁵