Family memories trace the roots of the Blankenship exodus to the state back to the Civil War. At that time, Blankenship relatives lived all over Virginia, including the part that would become West Virginia. Thus, Blankenships served on both sides. After the war, a family friend who had fought on the Confederate side fled Reconstruction and ended up in Washington. Over the years, he wrote back to extoll the wonders of his new home.
Although coal mining had brought prosperity to several counties in southern West Virginia, the financial “Panic of '93” brought job losses and reduced wages. Thus, that summer, sixty hopeful “pioneers” – including several Blankenship families and in-laws – boarded a train for Centralia.
Over a span of weeks, families scattered around the region, buying property or claiming homesteads. Several settled near the town of Riffe, about 40 miles southeast of Chehalis. (The town site is now covered by Lake Riffe.) They would have had some sense of home because the area was similar to mountainous Appalachia where they had started.
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| Near Welch, West Virginia. Near Riffe, Washington. Library of Congress. |
The 1893 expedition did not include Frank Blankenship’s immediate family. He was born in West Virginia in 1903, a year or so before they moved to Washington. (His grandfather died in August 1908 and was buried near Mossyrock, a few miles west of Riffe.) Frank apparently alternated between work as a logger or farm laborer. But life was hard, and the family went back to West Virginia at least twice. Still, in March 1926, Frank was in Lewis County, where he married 19-year-old Garnet Lenore Perkins.
She was the older sister of Cad Byron Perkins. As it happens, the Perkins family also had West Virginia connections, even though Cad and Lenore had been born in northwest Virginia. In 1910, the family lived across the state line from McDowell County, West Virginia, where the Blankenship family had roots. They moved to Lewis County around 1912 and settled near Riffe. By the time of his sister’s wedding, Cad had found work as a logger and lumber mill worker.
However, the Crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression made it hard to find steady work. Perkins managed to hang on, but Frank, Lenore, and their young daughter were living with his family back east at the time of the 1930 U.S. Census. Frank finally managed to scrounge work on a public road crew, so he and Lenore were in Washington in the summer of 1933. (It appears that their daughter Wanda was still living with relatives in the East.)
However, times were still tough and, in desperation, Blankenship may have resorted to cattle rustling. In fact, Cad later claimed that Frank had tried to lure him into helping steal range stock. (That assertion could not be corroborated, however.) Testimony also showed that Frank envied the relative prosperity of his still unmarried brother-in-law. Cad did have an “understanding” with a local divorcee, but it’s not clear if the two were formally engaged.
Matters came to a head when a calf disappeared from a herd in the area. The rancher began to ask around, and Blankenship said (paraphrasing varied testimony), “That had to be my wife’s no-good brother, Cad.” He repeated that story around the area. To reinforce the general idea, he also accused Cad’s 18-year-old sister of “playing around with everyone.”
Naturally, Cad was outraged when rumors began to float around that he was a stock thief, and that his sister was a tramp. But Frank was believed to carry a ready knife, and had even boasted about his ability to take care of himself with it. Thus, before confronting his brother-in-law, Cad borrowed a pistol, a Luger automatic. Then he also borrowed a car and drove out to the road site where Frank was working.
He drew Frank off for a private talk, and demanded that he stop spreading lies about him and his sister. Frank’s response: He was sure Cad was a rustler; he “had too much money for a common man.” Then Frank took it to another level, asserting that the sister had even fooled around with him.
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| Frank Blankenship. Family Archives. |
“You’re a *#!*#*! liar,” Cad retorted. At that point, Cad testified, Frank seemed about to pull out his knife or at least try to punch him, so he fired the Luger. He’d meant it more or less as a warning, but thought the bullet had hit Frank in the chest. Realizing how much trouble he was in, Cad drove into Chehalis to surrender to the sheriff. As it happened, a telephone call had already summoned Sheriff John A. Blankenship. They passed on the road, but Blankenship didn’t know the car Cad was driving. The Chehalis police chief took Perkins into custody.
Sheriff Blankenship was related – a third cousin – to the victim. He was born in 1881 in Webster County, West Virginia. He was twenty years old when his family moved to Lewis County. The Blankenships ran to large broods … John would eventually have eight brothers and sisters. In 1907, John returned to West Virginia long enough to marry a school teacher and bring her out to Washington. Their family was not quite as large, “only” six children after seventeen years of marriage. John ran a farm until about 1927, when he was appointed as a deputy sheriff. Then he was elected sheriff starting in 1931.
Perhaps a week or so after the shooting, the Lewis County prosecutor hired criminologist Luke May to help with the case. May logged it as a “firearms” case, but that evidence was minimal. Frank had not been hit in the chest. Instead, the fatal bullet had hit him in the side of the neck and exited on the far side of this throat. The slug was never recovered. Still, in the prosecutor’s view, the wound pattern negated Cad’s self-defense claim. He tried Perkins on a charge of first degree murder and demanded the death penalty.
So far as we know, May did not appear on the stand at the trial. However, he and his agents found sixteen prosecution witnesses who testified about the bad blood between the brothers-in-laws. One heard Cad say, “My day is coming, and I’ll get Frank yet.” The self-defense plea was further undermined by the fact that the sheriff found no knife on or near Frank’s body.
The defense countered with twenty-six witnesses of their own. They agreed that Cad was angry with Frank. But he had good reason, since Blankenship had indeed been spreading nasty stories about Cad and his “little sister.” Testimony apparently also offered strong circumstantial evidence that Frank himself had stolen the calf that brought the issue to a head. But no butcher in the region admitted to buying the animal, so Frank had perhaps kept the meat for his own use.
After deliberating for an evening and part of the next morning, the jury found Perkins guilty of the much lesser charge of manslaughter. He received a sentence of 10 to 15 years in prison.
Lenora (Perkins) Blankenship remarried in May 1937. She and her new husband, but not daughter Wanda, were living in Centralia at the time of the 1940 census. Cad Perkins spent less than five years in prison. He married divorcee Mabel (Bradley) Crouse in December 1938. He was employed as a logger west of Olympia at the time of the census.
| References: “[Blankenship – Perkins News],” Daily Olympian, Olympia, Seattle Times, Chehalis Bee-Nugget, Bellingham Herald, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon (May 1927 – December 1937). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| Alma Nix, John Nix (Eds.), The History of Lewis County, Washington, Lewis County Historical Society, Chehalis, Washington (1985). |
| Buddy Rose, Stories from Riffe, Wash., Gorham Printing, Centralia, Washington (2013). |
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