Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing

By Jane Green

Chapter One: Flight, Fight, or Obey?

The law is something that is supposed to make life safer and easier for all of us. If we follow the law, we should be okay. If we don’t, then there will be consequences that will make us wish we had followed the law.

People who make crime their livelihood seem to have figured this out and plan accordingly. They calculate their risks and decide how to mitigate them.

For normal people, however, encounters with the law are sudden, unanticipated events, and therefore highly emotional for us. When we see a State Trooper parked along I-70, our pulse rate goes up; if we see the trooper pull into our lane of traffic, our hands start to sweat. We slow down regardless of how fast we are going.

If the trooper turns on his lights behind us, we get a little panicky. Thoughts of outrunning him or losing him by taking the next exit run through our minds. Alternatively, we get outraged and a little combative, thinking, “There are people out here going much faster than I am!” or “He should be going after real criminals instead of harassing honest, hardworking people who are just trying to get home to their families!”

When our brains perceive a threat to our wellbeing, they go into fight-or-flight mode. This is the reflexive response that would save us back in the day when it was a real live bear chasing us, not a Smokey whose car is right on our bumper with lights flashing and a siren beeping off-and-on to make sure he’s got our attention.

Even when we have the good sense to pull over to the side of the road, it takes a bit of effort to turn off the fight-or-flight response. Fortunately, the trooper understands this. He gives us a few minutes to settle down after we’ve pulled over to the side of the road before coming to our window and asking for our license and registration. Our hearts are still pounding, and we may tell him we weren’t really speeding, or give him a bogus excuse for why we were speeding, or start to cry, but the reality of the law and the need to face the consequences has sunk in, allowing us to behave rationally.

In the following series of articles about a legal case that started with a shooting near Fort Benjamin Harrison, 12 miles from Indianapolis, in 1913, questions related to “fight-or-flight” and the rule of law are important. The series also shows the kind of trouble even an unopened bottle of whiskey can cause.

Chapter Two: The Dowells of Jefferson County

From the perspective of a genealogist looking back into the mid-to-late 1800s, Elias Dowell is a mystery. He claimed on most census documents that he was born in North Carolina, but no other evidence appears to relate him to that state or to any other Dowells in North Carolina at that time. In any case, he arrived by 1850 in Carroll County, Kentucky, located on the Ohio River across from Jefferson County, Indiana, at the age of 24. He made saddles and other leather items for a living.

Two years later, he married Sarah Martin, who had been born in Connecticut in 1835. The couple resided in Kentucky. They had three children; two of them, Charlotte Magee Dowell and John Thomas Dowell, lived to adulthood. The third was stillborn.

When Sarah died in 1877, Elias moved back into the world of mystery. He might have married once or twice more. He might have fathered two more Kentucky-born children who moved to New York sometime after Elias died in 1897, probably when their mother married a New Yorker.

Elias’s son, John Thomas Dowell, born in 1858, did his best to establish a clan of Dowells with an Indiana girl named Clara Matilda Joyce, who was born in 1867 in Madison, the seat of Jefferson County. Madison is about 108 miles from Brazil as the crow flies. They had nine children, all of whom survived to adulthood.

By 1900, the Dowell family had left Kentucky to live across the river in Clara’s hometown of Madison. Madison was an old town by Indiana standards. It was settled in about 1808 and grew quickly as a major port on the Ohio River. As of 1850, Madison was the third largest city in the state after New Albany and Indianapolis. Madison was also the southern terminus of the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad, one of the first lines west of the Allegheny Mountains.

By the time the Dowells moved to Madison, the city’s riverport had been overshadowed by the ports of Louisville, Kentucky (46 miles downstream), and Cincinnati, Ohio (70 miles upstream). Nevertheless, the job opportunities in Madison were better than what they were in the still very rural area of Kentucky where they had lived.

Clara and John must have been particularly proud of their oldest child, Walter Lee Dowell, born in 1885. Until David Martin Dowell, their youngest child, was born in 1910, Walter had been there only son, followed by a string of girls.

By all accounts, Walter was smart, handsome, hardworking, and well-liked in the community. After graduating from high school, he went to work as a laborer at Tower Manufacturing Company in Madison, which had taken over the facilities of Johnson Yarn and Cordage in 1896.

Tower Company was known throughout Jefferson County as “The Tack Factory” because it made tacks and nails. The building covered 60,000 square feet. According to a 1900 souvenir edition of The Madison Daily Democrat, “Few that have not visited the interior of this mammoth concern have any idea of the immensity of the establishment and noted the fine, intricate and costly machinery in operation and the immense amount of product turned out each day.” Over time, fallen nails and tacks had blackened the factory floor.

Walter met Nadine Wallis Chaflin at The Tack Factory where she also worked. Nadine was born in Madison in 1893 and had always lived there. The couple married in 1910.

Walter and Nadine planned to start a family and were eager to do so on a sound financial footing. Both kept their jobs at The Tack Factory, but Walter took on additional employment by joining the National Guard.

That, as it turned out, was a mistake.

Chapter Three: The Ball Family of Marion County

The ancestors of the paternal line of Edwin Clifford Ball, Jr., came to the United States in the 1640s from Wales. They started off in Connecticut, made their way to New Jersey, and then to Ohio. By 1843, William Treen Ball, Ed’s grandfather, had settled near Lafayette, Indiana, in Tippecanoe County.

Ed had seven brothers and one sister—almost the reverse of Walter Lee Dowell’s female-dominant family. Like Walter, young Ed was born in Kentucky, where the family had moved so that Ed Sr. could take advantage of a job opportunity in a carriage factory there.

A spell of poor health caused Ed Sr. to lose his job as a carriage trimmer, which he had held for about 15 years. The family returned to Indiana by the turn of the century to live in Indianapolis. Ed Sr. became a traveling book seller, and when he died in 1933, his obituary noted that he was widely known as the “whistling book agent” and had traveled to nearly every town in Indiana and Ohio.

After graduating from high school, young Ed got a job as a ladies’ tailor at a tailoring company. Perhaps it was in that capacity that he met Viola Belle Phillips.

Viola had been married twice before becoming engaged to Ed. She married Otto Formes, a 21-year-old German immigrant, in 1901. She was 22. They had a son in 1903 named Hibbard Otto Formes and divorced two years later.

Viola married Edward F. Tavenor, a toolmaker, in 1906. Edward was a member of the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization established in the mid-1800s exclusively for white men. It emphasized patriotism and US independence and had thousands of members at its peak in the early 20^th century.

Edward died in 1909 at the age of 22 of typhoid fever. Outbreaks of typhoid, a water-borne bacteria spread also by humans, animals, and insects, were becoming more prevalent in the US as population density increased without sufficient improvement in sanitation procedures. The Improved Order of Red Men placed a notice in the newspaper calling on members of Edward’s “Comanche tribe” to attend his funeral.

Ed Ball and Viola married in 1910, and Hibbard, by that time seven years old, accepted Ed as his father. Whether as the result of adoption or a less formal decision, Hibbard Otto Formes became known as Hibbard Otto Ball.

Like Walter Dowell, Ed probably was looking to boost his income when he joined the Indiana National Guard, although patriotism also probably motivated both men. By 1913, Ed had reached the rank of sergeant, but Walter, who had joined in 1910, was still a private. This difference suggests that Ed had probably joined around 1909.

The Indiana National Guard traces its origins to 1801, when the Indiana Territory organized militia companies to defend local settlements. During the late 19^th century, state militia groups voluntarily contributed much of the force for US military actions.

The Governor of Indiana has command of the Indiana National Guard’s state-related missions, but US laws enacted during the first half of the 20^th century put state National Guard units under the command of the US military during times of national need.

Fort Benjamin Harrison was established as a training center for the Indiana National Guard in June 1904 in Lawrence Township, Marion County. In August 1906, 3,000 Indiana National Guard troops from around the state arrived at the fort. The troops expended 200,000 rounds of blank ammunition in mock battles and military maneuvers.

Ed and Walter first met when National Guard Units from all over Indiana participated in an encampment at Fort Harrison in 1913. The purpose was to learn from and train with regular US Army units.

It was a case of meeting at the wrong place at the wrong time.