Hellish Fiends, and Brutish Men

The San Francisco Examiner 4 May 1915

On Thursday, 24 June 1915, Mrs. Jessie L. Mayes, a widowed mother of four, left a wicker suitcase in E.J. Shefter’s drugstore on Second and Alder Streets, Portland, Oregon. A short while later, a teenage boy arrived and announced that he had been sent to retrieve the suitcase. 

Staff at the drugstore promptly handed the case over to the boy without a second thought, and he quickly disappeared with the luggage item. 

When Mrs.Mayes discovered her suitcase was missing, she was mortified. Inside the case were the things ‘Which she prizes more than all her other possessions,’ photographs of her two sons, both of whom had died in the past eighteen months.

Oscar, the youngest of Mrs. Mayes’ two sons, was lost and presumed drowned in Oregon’s Siletz River in November 1913. By the time of the theft of the suitcase, Oscar’s body had not been recovered.

23-year-old Jack Mayes, a resident of San Francisco, was flying a Curtiss biplane which crashed into a building at Aguascalientes, just south of Juarez, Mexico. Silas Christofferson, the well-known early birdman, knew Mayes and taught him at his flying school. He described him to newspapers as ‘a steady and reliable flyer.’      

The Oregon Daily Journal 23 May 1915

Christofferson reported that he cautioned Mayes against flying the plane, which it is believed that the pilot had repaired shortly before setting off on his final flight. Ironically, Silas Christofferson would be killed in October 1916 after a biplane he was testing crashed at Redwood City, California.

The aircraft was attached to Pancho Villa’s forces, engaged in a bloody civil war with the Constitutionalist forces under Carranza and Obregón. The plane was to be used for scouting troop movements rather than ‘for bomb dropping’.

In the aftermath of the crash, the newspapers reported that Mayes’ aeroplane had been travelling at sixty miles per hour ‘the machine having become unmanageable’. The San Francisco Examiner added that ‘Mayes’ head and shoulders were crushed’ When the plane struck the corner of an adobe house.

Mayes left a widow; the newspapers didn’t report her name at ‘740 Sixth Avenue, in the Richmond district.’ 

The pilot’s mother had only just returned home after ‘a five weeks’ siege in a hospital’ when news broke about her son’s death. The Oregon Daily Journal reported that she was unaware that Jack was an aviator ‘but supposed he was running an automobile in San Francisco.’ The Daily Journal went on to say that ‘Mrs. Mayes has been attended by her daughters, Mrs. Roy Smith of Missoula, Mont.; and Miss Jennie Mayes of McMinnville, since her illness.’

It was initially planned to send the body home for burial, but ‘General Villa stated that it would be best to bury the body in Mexico.’  

Jack Mayes’ widow appealed to the Secretary of State William Bryan to have her husband’s body repatriated to no avail.

 © Mark Young 2024

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Christofferson

The Oregon Daily Journal

The San Francisco Examiner