Grandfather Clause: Tracing Ancestral Privilege to a Century-Old Crime Scene

grand·fa·ther.  (verb) [with object] . . . 2. to permit to continue under a grandfather clause: As in, to pass down privilege . . .
— from Grandfather, A Van. Jordan

I.

From behind the Deer Lodge County Courthouse, in Anaconda, Montana, Mount Carmel and Mount Olivet Cemeteries command a broad view of a narrow vale. Joseph Furshong and Sam Dragicovich are buried here. The first is my great-grandfather. The second is a man he killed. 

From their gravestones, many things fall into view. The transept of Park and Main marks the center of town, home to the world’s largest copper refinery for nearly a century. It closed in 1980 after 96 years. Once busy streets lie arrow straight and evenly spaced as though T-squared across a drafting table. This tidy grid draws a sharp contrast with the warren of pinched byways that wind through nearby Butte. For Anaconda was a smelter town platted for a well-lit life above ground, not a mining city patched together for a dimly lit life below.

Warm Springs Creek flows east through town between two mountain fronts that climb ten thousand feet, the southerly Anaconda Range and northerly Flint Creek Range. Between them there is less sunshine than shadow, but the creek drains into open country. It joins the Silver Bow and turns north across the Deer Lodge Valley, a fertile plain sixty miles wide. 

Years ago, while driving along that creek, my father shared a stunning fragment of family history. “Your great-grandfather killed a man on this highway,” he said. “Right about here.” The jarring pronouncement adjusted my vision. I began to examine the roadside for verification, the barrow pit and barbed wire streaming by my window. “There was a trial and everything.”  

He spoke as though the incident could be cataloged among other ancestral adventures he chronicled for my brothers and me on visits to his hometown. But how to label the revelation of manslaughter? It was a bloody climax without context. There was no beginning or end. No explanation. No victim. 

This void troubled me more than it would have a few years before. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements had recently sparked powerful debates about privilege, and I was newly interested in my family history, attending to details I previously took for granted. I was beginning to see how privilege was an integral, rather than incidental, part of my life. 

This new awareness made old ignorance less comfortable. So, I asked my father, an avid genealogist, to help me discover what happened. Together, we spent two years excavating historical archives in three different counties and leafing through online annals of century-old newspapers. We built a sequence of events before and after the homicide, trailed its aftereffects to the present day, and revised our understanding of why we are here. For the first time, we followed a dark trace in our family history to exactly where it began. 

On December 14, 1920, shortly after midnight, Dragicovich, a fifty-eight-year-old Serbian immigrant, left Anaconda on foot in the heart of a winter gale. A half hour later, Furshong, a thirty-two-year-old American veteran of WWI, departed by car along the same route. They traveled, one after the other, along the only paved highway in the state. At a slum pond, two miles east of town, a dirt road angled north. There, blizzard conditions whipped snow and copper slag into a dangerous slurry. Both men entered this storm, and their lives were joined by a fatal crash. 

II.

Sam Dragicovich woke on the cold morning of Monday, December 13, 1920. He lay beneath secondhand bedding on a bunk at the Deer Lodge County Poor Farm, six miles from town. He dressed quietly in the dark room, careful not to wake his roommates. He pulled one pair of pants over another by jerks and tugs, khakis for insulation and corduroys for wind. He layered every piece of clothing he owned. Two cotton shirts, red sweater, brown jacket, and a new cravenetted cap advertised by Regal and Spear as “proof against rain and snow.” With a broom handle in hand to leaven the pain of crippled feet, he stepped into the outer dark. 

A later start would have allowed a warmer walk, but his injured body made poor time, and worse weather was on its way. It was a twelve-mile round trip, and he was determined to complete the journey. A letter had arrived in town, and for the first time in a while, there was hope in his heart.

Eight months earlier, on April 18, 1920, Sam’s brother, Mike Dragicovich, hung two American flags in the window of his Los Angeles apartment, placed a revolver against his head, and pulled the trigger. A neighbor rushed into his room after hearing the report. As blood pumped from the wound, Mike whispered his final words, “My United States, my United States.” 

The Los Angeles Express reported the tragedy beneath a front-page headline the next morning: “Man, Fearing Deportation, Kisses Flag, Ends Life.” “One of the roomers in the same house told officers that Dragich [sic] had been worried greatly over the threats of two persons to have him deported,” the article read. “He told the roomer that he would die sooner than leave the United States.”

Mike, Sam, and their sister Annie were ethnic Serbs who immigrated to the U.S. from the shifting borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the century. Today, we can only guess at the names their parents gave them. Mihajlo, Samuilo, Ana. They came from a time and place where modern nation states were nascent and ethnic origins eluded national identity. They formed bonds with those who spoke Serbian and wrote Cyrillic, and they sold their labor to Montana’s “Copper Kings.”

Mike lived and worked in Anaconda for years before moving to California. Annie married a man named Nick Vuckovich and settled in Anaconda. Sam also remained after securing employment in a blast furnace, smelting copper for the Anaconda Company. In December 1909, this modest livelihood crumbled when his feet were crushed by an ore car. 

Two years before the accident, Sam lived for a spell at the country poor farm, a dangerous and unsanitary operation with inadequate water supply or heating, according to county records. Taxpayers funded the farm to care for indigent men afflicted with tuberculosis, alcoholism, or injury. After his release from St. Ann’s hospital in January, Sam almost certainly returned to the farm to convalesce, and he was living there in 1920 when his brother committed suicide. 

The tragic news must have come as a shock. Ironically, it also carried a measure of hope. Annie’s son, also named Nick, had recently traveled to California to settle his uncle’s estate. According to newspaper accounts, Sam was expecting a letter clarifying the details of the will. The Anaconda Standard reported that Sam had “expressed the hope that his share [of Mike’s assets] would be sufficient to enable his return to his old home in Austria.” 

According to Nate Miller, Superintendent of the farm, Dragicovich set out to retrieve this letter on the morning of December 13. He walked along a county road that hugged the frozen banks of Warm Springs Creek before turning west onto Highway 1. He passed the Anaconda Company’s new 585-foot smokestack, recently erected to lift the smelter’s toxic pall above town. It belched smoke into the brightening sky.

As he drew closer to town, Dragicovich heard street cars shuttling to and from the smelter. He entered Goosetown, a blue-collar neighborhood settled by Irish, Italian, Serb, and Croatian immigrants. Of Anaconda’s 11,668 residents, 3,196 were foreign born laborers and merchants who lived mostly in this quarter of crude boarding houses, backyard chicken coops, and shotgun shacks. A district of forty-three blocks with twenty bars and two churches.

Dragicovich dropped by the post office and sprung for a shave at Ed Johnson’s barbershop. He visited friends and probably tarried for food and drink as the glancing winter sun set and storm clouds gathered above.

By 9:00 p.m., “blinding snows” were falling in the center of the city. At the town common, scores of ice skaters were corralled off the rink and urged to take shelter. “The temperature dropped to 18 degrees above zero for the first time this winter,” The Anaconda Standard reported, and “threatened to descend still lower.”

Perhaps Dragicovich planned to lodge with a friend, or maybe he mistook the blizzard for a passing squall. Whatever the reason, he remained in town as the temperature tumbled and the wind began to howl. One of his last stops was the home of Robert Milkovich, a well-known member of the Serbo-Slogo Society. Milkovich lived on a corner lot in Goosetown where the railway crossed East Commercial Avenue and climbed toward the hulking furnaces of Smelter Hill. Snow piled against the iron foot of an electric streetlamp outside his front door, casting light across the tracks toward Highway 1. In 1920, this was the edge of town.

Milkovich told the Standard he bid farewell to Dragicovich at 10:00 p.m. It is unknown what he did in the next two hours. By midnight, he had traveled a mile from Milkovich’s doorstep. He was trudging east along the dark highway in foul weather.

III.

Joseph Furshong woke on the cold morning of Monday, December 13, 1920. A veteran of the great war, he felt the effects of mustard gas behind his eyelids and deep in his lungs. Memories of the Marne River and Argonne Forest were just two years old, near enough to touch and smell.

From the window of his room in the Mableton building, he could almost see the front door of his barbershop on the ground floor of the Beaudry block, at 322 E. Park. He dressed in a white shirt, dark slacks, and tie. He descended a flight of steps to the street and took his breakfast at a neighborhood cafe. Then, he fell into his morning routine at the barbershop, sweeping steps, wiping counters, and honing tools. 

Born to Acadian immigrants in Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1887, Furshong was raised in Nova Scotia, one of twenty full and half siblings. He grew up bilingual, an American citizen with francophone roots. He trained into his profession as a teenager before moving to Anaconda with his brother Theodore in 1912. After enlisting in the army, he was assigned to the Rainbow Division, which endured 264 days of combat. In eleven months, the division suffered 14,683 reported casualties, dead and wounded, more than any other American division in WWI. 

As the survivor of a brutal gas attack, Furshong was one of these casualties, and he was welcomed in Anaconda after the war. On October 25, 1919, the Standard announced his return. “Joseph Furshong (better known as ‘Fat, the Barber’), just returned from overseas, has opened a barber shop in the Beaudry block.” His trade gave him passage to middle-class life. It also spared him admission to the poor houses, hospitals, and asylums that warehoused many veterans disabled in France and Belgium.

After closing shop for the day, Furshong met Bert Wilson, probably at the “soft drink parlor” Wilson owned at 311 E. Park, across the street from the Beaudry. Montana voters had approved a ban on the “production, sale, and use” of alcohol in 1916, four years before prohibition became the national norm. By a slim margin, however, Anaconda residents had opposed these restrictions, and small batch moonshine was available at “home speaks,” soda fountains, and roadhouses throughout the county.

Wilson was a known bootlegger. He likely learned the trade after his arm was “crushed between cross cables while working for the Anaconda Company” in May of 1919. He was jailed twice for selling liquor in May 1921 and April 1922, but in the winter of 1920 his business was stable. 

Furshong drank with Wilson as a curtain of snow fell outside the parlor window. Gradually, the storm obscured Furshong’s view of the comforts he’d salvaged after the war: a quiet room and profitable barbershop. It’s unknown how much alcohol he consumed, but it seems the two friends ran dry around midnight. 

Bracing themselves for a frigid ride, they settled into the front seat of Furshong’s 1915 Model T, a car with wooden spokes, a canvas top, and no side windows. The glass windscreen was iced over, and snow swirled into the cab, binding their headlights in a white cocoon. Darkness swallowed them as they gathered speed on Highway 1. 

A mile ahead, Dragicovich steadied himself with a broom handle through gusts of snow and slag. The car cut his feet out from under him, opening an eight-inch laceration across the shin of his right leg, snapping the tibia and fibula, and thrusting their fractured ends through the surface of his skin. His left leg broke higher, between hip and knee. His body spun toward the car, crushing his left ribs against the driver’s side door and whipping his head into the vehicle. His body was thrown fifteen feet from the pavement. 

“I understand that he had blood on his hands,” the county medical examiner would later report. “There was not a depressed fracture of the skull, and from any other thing death would not be instantaneous.” 

Dragicovich struggled to breathe as snow gathered around him. His hands searched in the dark for information on his injuries. As he lay dying, the taillights of Furshong’s Model T disappeared into a tempest.

IV.

The next morning, Undersheriff Joseph Henault responded to a call about the body. He found a broomstick and a tire pump scattered near Dragicovich. He also noted that, despite bitterly cold conditions, the dead man had no hat.

According to The Butte Miner, which printed news from neighboring Anaconda, Henault “picked up his first clew [sic] when he found that the car belonging to Joe Furshong . . . had been in an accident sometime during the night.” He quickly arrested Furshong. Meanwhile, the coroner scheduled an inquest to determine the cause of death. He ordered Henault, a host of witnesses, and a six-man jury to report to Finnegan’s Funeral Parlor, where the deceased lay waiting.

The inquest began at 7:30 p.m. on December 15. Furshong and Wilson refused to testify, but information from seven witnesses filled thirty-one typed pages. These accounts of Furshong’s actions received top billing in The Standard, Miner, and Butte Daily Post on December 16. 

After leaving Anaconda around midnight, Furshong crashed into Dragicovich near the slum pond and did not stop the car. A few minutes later, he arrived with Wilson at the Three Mile House, a juke joint on the banks of Mill Creek, roughly three miles east of town. The maximum speed of a 1915 Model T was 45 mph, and even if the storm hindered his vision, Furshong should have seen Dragicovich prior to impact. According to Henault, however, Furshong remained circumspect after his arrest. “[He] said that he wasn’t drunk,” Henault testified, “that he had taken a few drinks, and . . . he said he didn’t know whether he had seen a man or not.”

When Henault pressed him, Furshong responded awkwardly. “He said that he had driven to the Three Mile House and that he had struck something,” Henault repeated, “that he didn’t know what it was and then he made the remark that Mr. Wilson told him he wasn’t going to ride with him.”

So, Furshong returned to Anaconda alone. Once in town, he maneuvered the damaged Ford to a garage operated by Ray Eccleston, a friend and fellow veteran. Eccleston explained that Furshong had been in “an accident” and “he didn’t know what it was.” 

Several hours later, daylight made plain what Furshong claimed to doubt. Henault located his car a few hours after the body was discovered. He noticed a tire missing and three spokes badly splintered on the left rear wheel. The driver’s side door was gouged and the varnish scraped away. Then, he peered inside the car and found the dead man’s hat.

Ownership of the hat was confirmed at the inquest by Nate Miller and Mike Mogus, the clerk who sold it to Dragicovich in November. The hat “naturally suggests that its owner was walking on the road when he was struck by the side of the car or by the running board,” Henault told the Standard, “which would cause his head to fly back, and the cap possibly to fall into the car.”

The coroner’s jury unanimously agreed that death “was occasioned by the deceased being struck by a Ford automobile driven by Joseph Furshong . . .” Thus, Dragicovich’s future was ended and Furshong’s was encumbered. The question remained whether Furshong would be held to account.

On Friday December 17, County Attorney David Morgan, a Democrat, charged Furshong and Wilson with manslaughter, and booked them in the county jail under $5,000 bonds (equivalent to $74,000 today). But on Saturday, Judge George Winston, a Republican, cut these sums in half. Within days, two downtown business owners and an influential Republican State Senator named J.B. Gnose bailed both men.

They pled not guilty on Christmas Eve, and Winston set a trial for April 12. If convicted, they faced a maximum ten-year sentence, but, as Christmas Day dawned, their bleak situation had brightened. Both men were back in business on Park Street, free to ponder the possibility of exoneration.

Elsewhere in the smelter town, Dragicovich’s sister, Annie, and his nephew, Nick, pondered the prospect of a fair trial in a country where White Nationalism was ascendent and immigrants were vilified by politicians from both parties.

V.

Three million people joined the U.S. military in 1917, and 116,000 died during the war. Survivors returned to a country in turmoil. The Spanish flu killed 675,000 people in 1918, and the economy plunged into recession. Two years later, a full-blown depression squeezed the job market to a trickle. 

In those lean years, labor unions doubled down in their fight for an equitable share of industrial spoils. In 1919, some four million workers organized over 3,600 work stoppages, and their bosses responded with brute force. Employers called for a federal crackdown on labor unrest, which triggered military occupations of several western mining cities, including Butte and Anaconda, between 1914 and 1921. 

The ruling class also pressured legislators to restrict free speech, break unions, and discourage immigrants from exercising the franchise. In February 1918, the Montana legislature passed several measures constricting civil rights. The most infamous was a sedition act that made criticism of the war effort punishable by a $20,000 fine or a twenty-year prison sentence. The law was passed by Republican majorities in the state legislature, including Senator Gnose, with support from Democratic Governor Sam Stewart. It became the model for federal legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Wilson three months later.

Newspaper owners fanned the hysteria, urging vigilantes to punish labor leaders and anti-war activists. On July 10, 1917, the Helena Independent called for a series of “hanging bees and shootings” to deal with the International Workers of the World, an influential anti-war union with a burgeoning membership in Butte. On April 17, 1918, the Miner warned that “any attitude or action that smacks of pro-Germanism will not be tolerated” and told readers to “keep your eyes open and spot that propaganda the moment you see it.”

Xenophobia spiked as the 1920 election drew near. The economy was foundering under a Democratic president, and Wilson’s support for the League of Nations clashed with a growing tide of isolationism among voters. The Montana Republican Party seized on these weaknesses. 

On October 25, a Daily Post ad signed by state and county Republican officials declared, “The Solution Now at Hand is the Overwhelming Defeat of the Mongrel Democratic Ticket . . .” Five days later, a full-page ad aligned notions of white supremacy with GOP candidates and suggested Democrats were non-white communists. The bold print demanded an answer: “Are You White or Red?”

This message resonated with white men who still dominated the electorate after passage of the nineteenth amendment two years earlier. A Republican wave lifted Warren Harding into the Oval Office on November 2 and delivered Republican majorities to the House and Senate. In Montana, Republicans won every statewide office, and white nationalists were emboldened. 

On December 22, Standard editors noted “the new Ku Klux Klan” was “gaining momentum in every section of the country” and emphasized the Klan’s desire to “promulgate and insist on 100% Americanism everywhere and under all circumstances.” The editorial even suggested this “new Klan” had abandoned violent tactics. “So long as it does not practice lawless methods” the Standard argued, it “shall not be interfered with.”

Dragicovich’s sister, Annie, and nephew, Nick, probably noted this public show of support for the KKK and its policy of accepting “only native-born White Caucasian Americans.” They would have been following the newspaper closely after Furshong and Wilson were bailed by Senator Gnose. They likely wondered how the prosecution of a crime against an unnaturalized “Austrian” would be handled in an American court. 

VI.

In the 1920 election, County Attorney Morgan filed for district judge and lost badly to Winston, who ran at the top of the GOP ticket in Deer Lodge County. The man who succeeded him was J. B. C. Knight, a Republican ally of Winston. In April 1921, these two men were preparing to try Wilson and Furshong for manslaughter.

On Monday, April 4, the names of fifty jurors were drawn. Eleven of these names were promptly removed by Winston, seven because they were no longer county residents and four because, Winston wrote, they “could not understand the English language sufficiently and understandingly.” These four names were tied, like Dragicovich, to Southern European family lines: Dragoye, Karavcich, Mantich, and Tomich.

On Wednesday, April 13, twelve more names were challenged by attorneys on each side of the case. From the remaining pool of twenty-nine men, the following Northern and Western European surnames survived: Gustafson, Corrigan, McMullen, Keogh, Lacey, Sparrow, Carroll, Kelly, Anderson, McCoy, Gilmore, and Smith. 

Ultimately, these jurors served for less than a day. The prosecution called ten witnesses on Wednesday afternoon. Seven had already testified during the coroner’s inquest, and their accounts were probably consistent with information they previously gave under oath. Two new witnesses, however, provided testimony that should have complicated Furshong’s defense. 

Chauncey Beal said he punched out of his smelter job shortly before Dragicovich was killed. While waiting for a streetcar, he sighted a figure walking along the highway with a cane. “When the car lights shone on the pedestrian,” he said, “he could be seen about 150 feet away.” According to Beal, visibility on that stormy night was higher than others claimed.

Ray Quane offered even more compelling testimony. He said Furshong woke him with a telephone call in the early hours of December 14, after the accident, to see whether he could purchase some gasoline. After dressing, Quane stepped outside and discovered Furshong attempting to fuel his damaged Ford “by the air tank instead of the gasoline tank.”

Quane testified “he could smell ‘drink’ on Furshong’s breath” and “was positive [he] had been drinking.” He asked Furshong to help push the damaged vehicle into the garage, but Furshong refused. So, Quane returned to bed. Around 10:30 a.m., however, Furshong returned with the wrecked car. This time, he told Quane, “he had been turning a corner when another car struck him.” 

This new explanation for the damaged vehicle differed from an account published in the Standard on the morning of the trial. “Furshong said he had driven to the Three Mile House and met with an accident that he believed was caused by skidding against a telegraph pole,” the newspaper reported. Jurors were thus informed that Furshong had provided three different explanations for the damage to the vehicle: one to Ray Quane the morning after the accident, another to Henault after his arrest, and a third to the Standard before his trial. 

Still, a critical question remained, did his actions amount to a crime? To meet the standard for manslaughter, the prosecution had to show that Furshong caused Dragicovich’s death while committing “an unlawful act not amounting to a felony” or “a lawful act that might produce death, in an unlawful manner, or without due caution or circumspection.” 

The coroner’s jury had already determined that Furshong was driving–-“a lawful act that might produce death”—when his car hit and killed Dragicovich. But was he driving in an unlawful manner or without due caution or circumspection? 

Furshong admitted to Henault that he had been drinking, and Quane confirmed that he was driving while intoxicated, which was “an unlawful act not amounting to a felony.” The evidence also established that he should have seen Dragicovich and was probably driving “without due caution or circumspection.” In short, Furshong’s conduct met the elements of the crime. In these circumstances, the law required Winston to hand judgment to a jury. But Winston had other plans.

On the evening of April 13, after the prosecution rested its case and before the defense called witnesses, Furshong’s lawyer, J. H. Duffy, moved to dismiss the case, arguing “the state did not furnish sufficient evidence to warrant the trial proceeding to a conclusion.” According to Winston’s notes in the district court journal, Duffy also “requested that the jury be excused” while the motion was debated. Winston granted this request, denying jurors the opportunity to understand whether the motion had merit. 

The county did not retain a transcript of the trial, and Winston’s summary of the proceedings is spare, but a skeletal record of his decision remains. On the morning of April 14, Winston sustained Duffy’s motion and explicitly instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. Then, a dozen men did as they were told. They set Furshong free.

VII.

My great-grandfather made the papers once more in 1921. In November, the Standard printed a curious announcement under the headline, “Anaconda Couple Took Marriage Vows in May.” “Miss Anna Manion and Joseph Furshong were quietly married May 15 at St. John’s church, Butte, by Rev. Father Batens of Centerville, it became known yesterday. The event was a complete surprise to their friends.” 

An unexpected pregnancy was almost certainly the reason for a discreet ceremony. The couple’s first child was born January 19, 1922, eight months after the wedding and nine months after the trial. My grandfather, Joseph Bernard Furshong, followed on April 13, 1923, the second of six children. My father, Joseph Ray Furshong, took his first breath twenty-five years later. 

The family my great-grandfather and great-grandmother began after his acquittal grew steadily. It grew, we believe, because he and Manion loved one another. It grew because they worked hard and made sacrifices for their children. And it grew because his freedom was never curtailed for his crimes.

Anna gave birth to four sons and two daughters in a span of seventeen years. Two of these children died young, but the remaining four were married and raised ten grandchildren. This generation raised fourteen great-grandchildren and seventeen great-great-grandchildren. Altogether, the lives of forty-seven people can be traced back to one urgent marriage in May 1921, a union forged fast on the heels of a manslaughter trial. 

With these unlikely lives in mind, I cannot help but wonder about other lives and alternate outcomes. What if Furshong had been the victim? What if an unnaturalized “Austrian” had killed a World War I veteran? Would Dragicovich have made bail and acquired a competent lawyer? Would a judge and jury have given him a second chance?

In 1920, certain candidates were more likely than others to be elected, certain defendants were more likely to be tried by a jury of their peers, and certain crimes were more likely to be adjudicated fairly. In 1920, a U.S. soldier who accidently killed an Austrian immigrant, after drinking at a local bar, could have received a ten-year sentence. A few years earlier, a German immigrant who criticized U.S. foreign policy, after drinking at a local bar, could have received a twenty-year sentence.

If one reads carefully, they can see this inequity on display in the Standard, Miner, and Post. In those pages, Dragicovich is called an “Austrian”, “cripple”, “inmate”, and “character.” Furshong is called a “barber,” “veteran,” and “serviceman.” These words are not merely descriptors of occupational or residential conditions. They are titles that carried a provision of public trust or mistrust: a measure of social capital that could be spent when help was needed or a burden of social debt that could discourage assistance in desperate times.

These words belonged to a code that indicated who had power in the United States and who did not, a cipher that classified people as American or something less than American. Actions followed these words. After the war, the American Legion, KKK, and their supporters successfully banned the German language from schools, churches, and libraries. Textbooks were re-written, and more than twenty states passed teacher-loyalty legislation. Thousands of Black men, women, and children were terrorized or killed by white mobs. And in 1924, President Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, dramatically reducing immigration to a country built by slaves and migrant workers.

When my father told me that my great-grandfather killed someone on Highway 1, he unintentionally spoke in this code. The victim was unknown, and context was not compulsory. The incident was encrypted as “ancestral anecdote,” and it was privilege that enforced this code. It was privilege that allowed consequential headlines to flicker in our minds and cut to black instead of reeling continuously through our conscious lives. 

Movement builders seeking to expose privilege today complicated our response to century-old headlines: Furshong Held in Death of Man; Bonds of Alleged Slayers Reduced; Judge Dismisses Furshong Charge. Their work encouraged my father and I to read beyond headlines, investigate actual events, and recover the truth. Their work invited us to revise our definition of privilege. 

In the past, I understood privilege as the overwhelming and inequitable accumulation of opportunity. This popular understanding is not incorrect, but it is problematic because it is imprecise and undocumented. It allows privileged people to escape into the present without having to account for how we got here. It encourages acknowledgement but stops short of any meaningful investigation.

Now, I recognize that privilege is precise. It is a fulcrum on which entire lives are balanced: our lives. It is, among other things, an identity or experience that enables people to evade justice. For my family, it was also the exact moment when a judge spoke the words not guilty.

Above the Deer Lodge County Courthouse, beneath cottonwoods that shelter Furshong and Dragicovich’s gravestones, I can see the block of Main Street where my father grew up. I see Warm Springs Creek, where he played with his brothers on summer afternoons. I can recall scenes from my own life, traveling along Highway 1 with my parents and brothers to a cabin on Georgetown Lake or a ski lodge in the Flint Creek Mountains. 

I can also see a distant road angling south along the creek. It joins the highway where my great-grandfather killed Sam Dragicovich. The course of generations makes its way through that winter night of December 13, 1920. It advances through the spring morning of April 14, 1921. It flows forward, through my father and me, and its course cannot be otherwise. It passes through my five-year-old daughter and my two-year-old son. And its passage is a privilege.

This way of life makes me wonder who we are. It makes me wonder where we go from here.