Every Family Has a Maverick, Part 2

When we last left our intrepid protagonist, John Jones, the Civil War veteran formerly known as Walter W. Collins, he had been honorably discharged from the army in February 1866 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was settling into a new life. Somewhere along the way, he had picked up skills in the building trades and was now working as a brick mason. This career seemed to suit his restless nature, as it allowed him to move from place to place, following the demand for new construction, considerable in the post-Civil War South, and he practiced this trade for much of the rest of his life.

Walter W. Collins, alias John Jones. c 1890s.

One place where John must have worked as a mason was Pope County, Arkansas, northwest of Little Rock, because it was there, in 1867, that he married a young widow named Chaney Jane (Cross) Duke, my great-great-great-grandmother. It seems likely that he never mentioned to her the wife and children he had left back in Iowa. He later told a pension office examiner that he felt free to marry again because he and his first wife had been separated so long that “the law operated to divorce her from me without any action by the courts,” a rather dubious assumption about common-law divorce.[1]

John and his new family then moved further northwest in Arkansas, ending up in Boone County, where he was elected local sheriff. This career change didn’t work out too well for him, though, as he ended up in arrears of nearly $22,000 owed to the state and county—a very large sum at the time—and had to flee the state to avoid prosecution. At the time, county sheriffs were expected to collect county taxes and transport the monies to the state treasury in Little Rock (Clayton 1915). It seems that those funds were never delivered for Boone County.

Anonymous. February 1, 1873. “Proceedings of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas.” Daily Arkansas Gazette, p. 1.

The state and county were able to make up most of the missing money from the individuals who had provided sureties for John at the time of his election as sheriff, but the scandal was a topic of much discussion in the 1873 state legislature, including the exchange below, reported in the Daily Arkansas Gazette on March 25, 1873:

Mr. Chapman: Do you know whether John Jones is there? He was the late defaulting sheriff of Boone county, and I would like to catch him.

Mr. Kent: I would say to the distinguished carpet-bagger from St. Louis that there is more than one John Jones in the state.

(Anonymous 1873).

John, like many before him, found Texas to be a good place in which to evade capture by the authorities. He settled in the Dallas area, where his second wife died in 1873, leaving him with three daughters under the age of 7. Unsurprisingly, he married again soon, but his third wife lived only until 1880. After that, John’s movements are less clear. He was living in Clay County, Texas, in 1890 and married for a fourth time there in 1891, legally this time, his first wife having died in 1890.

U.S. Census Bureau. 1890. Special Schedule—Surviving Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, and Widows, etc. Washington, DC: National Archives.

By 1898, John had moved to Oklahoma, where in 1904, he married his fifth wife, despite not having divorced the fourth one.  As he explained to the pension office:

I applied for a divorce at Enid, Oklahoma, in 1895, but later withdrew the suit, as unreasonable alimony was demanded of me. A couple of years later, I went to Woodworth, Oklahoma, and again entered suit for divorce. That is, I employed Temple Houston, a local attorney, to bring the suit. I believe now I was arranging to bring suit for divorce this last time in 1903. Before it could be gotten underway, however, word came from her nephew, Edward Palmer, of Ryan, Oklahoma, that my wife was dead. So the suit was not pushed.

This account aside, John’s fourth wife actually didn’t die until 1906, more than two years after his marriage to wife number five, to whom he remained married until his death in 1909 in Polk County, Arkansas.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the escapades of Walter W. Collins, alias John Jones, is that I actually was able to learn this much about him. Genealogy is much easier when searching for individuals with unusual names, and when I learned I had an ancestor named John Jones, I assumed I would never know much about him.

I was saved, in this case, by government bureaucracy. John Jones, like many other Union Army veterans, applied for a partial disability pension from the U.S. government. He had his army discharge papers, so had no difficulty proving his service, and was granted a pension in 1891, on the grounds of piles (hemorrhoids), catarrh (post-nasal drip), disease of the bladder, and failing eyesight, despite a surgeon’s report finding little evidence of these complaints.

This again might have been the end of the story had it not been for a vindictive daughter, who in 1908 wrote to the pension office, alleging that her father was collecting a pension under an assumed name and had not actually served in the military (she also stated that he was a gambler and consorted with “low types” and that his fifth wife was a gold-digger just after his pension). The bureaucracy sprang into action and sent a special examiner to interview John, his daughter, their neighbors, his brother Morrison Collins, and several of his former military comrades. These hundreds of pages of testimony I found in his pension file, carefully catalogued under both names and accompanied by a daguerreotype that he gave to the examiner to show his former comrades so they could identify him.

In the end, the pension office concluded that he was entitled to the pension, having served a full term in the army, albeit under an assumed name. They did, however, note that he was receiving too large a pension payment, given that he was born in 1838, rather than 1835 as he had said in his original application. I doubt they got their money back, since John died soon after, but the paper trail the bureaucracy left allowed me to follow the tracks of my family maverick.

[1] In fact, while common-law marriage does exist, common-law divorce does not. Even people who are married under common law have to go to the courts to deal with issues such as community property and child custody.

Works Cited

Clayton, Powell. 1915. The Aftermath of the Civil War, in Arkansas. New York: The Neale Publishing Company.

Folger, Jean. 2024. “Splitting Property After a Common-Law Marriage.” Investopedia.