Later Life
Kitty Wilkins remained single her whole life. There are some reports that she was engaged to marry her foreman, Joseph Pellessier, when he was killed in a range dispute in 1909. Historian Hawes, noted above, makes no mention of such an arrangement. Kitty would have been 52 years old at the time; Pellessier was 45 when he was killed.
Kitty remained actively engaged with friends and family. According to Hawes, she “was extremely charitable toward the poor and unfortunate, though little of her charity is known to the world.” Philip Holman, who has studied Kitty’s life extensively, said that, at her death, her papers contained “a number of unpaid bills and applications for public assistance.”
Kitty’s last appeared in public for the 1934 Fort Boise Centennial Celebration, which commemorated the founding of the old Hudson’s Bay Company station at the mouth of the Boise River. She died two years later in Glenns Ferry, and was buried in Mountain Home.
Read more about this topic: Kitty Wilkins
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“He can have this old life anytime he wants to. You hear that? Huh, you hear it? Come on. You’re welcome to it, Old Timer. Let me know you’re up there, come on. Love me, hate me, kill me,
anything. Just let me know it.”
—Donn Pierce, U.S. screenwriter, Frank R. Pierson, and Stuart Rosenberg. Luke Jackson (Paul Newman)