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.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
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Tomorrow new diaries consulted, new calendars stand;
With such small adjustments life will again move forward
Implicating us all; and the voice of the living be heard:
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Us who need you, and are affected by your fortune;
Us you should love and to whom you should give your word.””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)