The Miner and Young Families
I’m writing this post today to give readers an overview of two interrelated families who are important to the history of Monroe, Wisconsin. The Young family, who I think needs little introduction, supplied us with our late 19th century NYC publishing representatives, Arthur Henry Young (“Art Young”) and William Wesley Young.
These boys’ father, Daniel S. Young— who until the 1880s went by “Danl”— was the son of New England settlers. His mother, Louisa, came from an Ohio branch of the Miner family, which originated in Connecticut. She already had a relative in Monroe when her son Danl decided to move here in 1869 with his aged parents, young wife and small son Arthur: the wealthy Rev. Samuel Elbert Miner.
Rev. Samuel Elbert Miner was from the “Manassah” branch of family patriarch Thomas Miner’s Connecticut clan. This same Mannassah branch was represented in Steuben County, New York state, from where Bonelatta Gang contact Joshua D. Miner learned the counterfeiting trade from his father, who I’ll talk about shortly.
Rev. Samuel Elbert Miner settled in Monroe, WI at approximately that same time Napoleon Bonaparte Latta relocated his counterfeiting headquarters here. Latta was forced to vacate his Michigan stronghold when his father was busted for counterfeiting near the Upper Peninsula (“U.P.”).
After a few months preaching here, Rev. Miner gave up the cloth to become a lumber merchant. Over the course of the Bonelatta Gang’s heyday, when 5 out of 12 Monroe residents worked with the counterfeiters, Rev. Miner blossomed into one of the town’s wealthy citizens. Danl Young joined Monroe’s business community in 1869 when Rev. Miner had demonstrated his financial success and the Bonelattas were at the peak of their game.
Was it coincidence that Rev. Samuel Elbert Miner came to Monroe and struck it rich during our town’s dark period (1857-1871) as a leading center for organized crime? The nature of 19th century counterfeiting networks would suggest not. These crime networks were tight-knit, extended-family operations which grew as sons and cousins settled westward or daughters married into other counterfeiting families. In-group compliance was enforced via family ties and a culture of blood-oaths, which historian Kathleen Kimball Melonakos identifies as derivative of Freemasonry— a politically sensitive topic in the 1830s and 40s.
Rev. Samuel Elbert Miner was a man of great passion, self-righteousness and a had a willingness to force himself and his ideas onto other people. One of the first things that the The US Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men, Wisconsin Volume (1877) tells us about the reverend is that his pilgrim-derived Connecticut relatives were really honest: "not one of them ever having been accused of crime”. The counterfeiting scandal involving Joshua D. Miner and the Bonelatta gang had broke in 1871, more Josh Miner scandals would break in the early 1880s until Joshua D’s death in 1886.
Prior to settling in Monroe, Rev. Miner was politically active as an abolitionist and studied at a seminary that was shut down by the State of New York for its provokatsiya-like activities: “The institution [Oneida Institution] was established as a protest against American slavery, and the curriculum of studies was arranged with a view to qualifying its students for fighting Christian battles with bible weapons. …. An institution so much at variance with the animus of the times, could hardly expect exemption from opposition and obloquy. The American Education Society withdrew its aid from the students, while the State refused a college charter. Hundreds of young men were thus made to feel more intensely the curse of slavery, and became the life-long persistent enemies of that institution.”
Modern historians sometimes downplay the fact that many abolitionists were violent radicals who relied on terrorism and coercion to achieve their aims, and some had very dubious foreign intelligence connections (like with the White-Slaver Hapsburgs) or enjoyed support from communities disproportionately enriched by slavery in their recent past (like the Quakers). Rev. Miner fit in comfortably with the 1840s-60s abolitionist crowd, raking in Wisconsin donations by railing against slavery in our non-slave-holding state— but a state where abolitionist bankers invested heavily in slave-holding ones:
During this period the slave-holding power in both church and state reached the apogee of its arrogance, and threatened to subordinate the whole nation to its influence. Our subject's training had fitted him for this emergency. He [Rev. Miner] entered with all his strength and soul into the struggle, and wielded an influence second to none in the State, and to few in the country in crystallizing the then rapidly forming anti-slavery sentiment, which in 1860 swept the nation. He exchanged frequently with brother ministers, and in every pulpit and on every platform he earnestly preached an anti-slavery gospel. He had also some memorable encounters with temporizing and timid brethren of the ministry. These were by far the most important, though not the most popular, years of his ministry.
Many Wisconsinites saw the Civil War as a war about bankers’ profits being harmed by Southern secession, rather than the morals of slavery. (Neither Christianity, Islam nor Judaism were historically opposed to slavery; anti-slavery activism became popular in the 18th century as a result of economic competition between the British and French Empires.)
Even before his entry into Bonelatta-era Monroe, Rev. Miner had access to funds far in excess of what his parishioners could have reasonably supplied him with. For instance, in 1844 he was able to erect a church in Madison which cost of two thousand dollars: “a sum equal to the entire wealth of the membership of the congregation”. This remarkable achievement is somewhat explained by the fact that Rev. Miner was that same year elected chaplain of the territorial legislature, and shortly thereafter as chaplain of the first constitutional convention of Wisconsin: he had powerful friends. At this time Rev. Miner was of the “congregational” persuasion, meaning his religious ideas were fashioned on the independent, but sometimes uneducated and extra-biblical, teachings which motivated settlers like the Pilgrims, whose religious communities on occasion spun off into bizarre crazes and “enthusiasms”.
One such community was the Bethlehem Settlement near Woodbury, Connecticut, where Justus Miner (29 Aug, 1762 - 27 Jul, 1850) was born before moving to Geauga, Ohio. Justus was Louisa Miner’s grandfather. The inhabitants of the Bethlehem Settlement (founded 1738) were famous for their religious extremism, which at times veered into antinomianism, much like contemporaneous religious communities lead by Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf in the decades immediately preceding Justus’ birth. As recorded by one of the Settlement’s leading members, Dr. Joseph Bellamy:
“In the fall of 1740, a little after Mr. Whitefield preacht through the country & in the Winter & Spring & Summer following, religion was again greatly revived & flourisht wonderfully. Every man, woman and child, about 5 or 6 years old & upwards were under religious concern, more or less. Quarrels were ended, and frolicks flung up. Praying meetings began & matters of religion were all the talk. The universal concern about religion in its height, many were seemingly converted, but there were false comfort & experiences among the rest which laid a foundation,
(1) For False religion to rise & prevail (2) Many that were beat down, some fell into a melancholy, sour frame of spirit, bordering on despair, & others into carnal security; and the truly Godly seemed to be but a very few! And now very trying times follow, for (1) a number of the more elderly people being ambitious & having a grudge at each other are continually formenting contention, strife and division about society affairs, (2) A number of the middle aged stand up for false religion & plead for the seperatists, (3) A number of the younger sort set themselves up frolicking & serving the flesh-- true piety & serious Godlines, are almost banished-- this is a summary view of things from 1740 to 1750, & much so has it been in other places.”
Artist/poet William Blake was heavily influenced by the sensual interpretation of Christianity espoused by Count Zinzendorf and his son: ”William Blake, Mary Magdalene Washing Christ’s Feet (c. 1805). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mrs. William Thomas Tonner, 1964.”
The Miner family was, therefore, represented among practitioners of the sometimes self-serving religious radicalism and idealism which both graced and cursed New England. At the darker end of this spectrum we find men like Joshua D. Miner.
Readers will remember Joshua D. Miner as the NYC and Washington D.C. contact used by the Bonelatta Gang to get the engraving plates for their Treasury Bill counterfeiting. This crime was done with a wink and a nod from Lincoln’s political camp, and wasn’t prosecuted until said camp lost control of the Treasury in late 1870.
Joshua D. Miner earned his high-level political contacts not in New York, but in Ohio, where he ran after fathering an illegitimate child in 1854. (Philo Miner, Louisa’s father, had settled in Ohio two decades prior.) Joshua D. Miner had continued his counterfeiting business in Ohio and ultimately came to the attention of Governor Salmon P. Chase, who gave him political protection. Joshua relocated to NYC, the capital of both the US printing industry and its underworld alter, the counterfeiting trade, where he set up producing fake bills on an industrial scale. His engraver, Bill Watson, was then hired by Chase for the “Greenback”-producing Treasury while moonlighting for the Bonelatta Gang out of Monroe, WI.
I could find no census nor genealogical information on Joshua D. Miner, but newspaper-sourced details of his family life make it highly probable that his father was Marinus Willett Miner (22 Dec, 1801 — 8 Oct, 1871). This Allegany branch of the Miners were descended from Marinus’ dad, Absalom Miner of New Haven, Connecticut, who had married into the notorious Rhode Island Gorton family. Unsurprisingly, the Gortons did business with RI slave-trade magnate Aaron Lopez at a time when this trade was closely linked to counterfeiting.
[Clarification 12/17/2021. The Gortons were prominent during RI’s counterfeiting heyday; Benjamin, Edward and John Gorton were engaged in business with Lopez, but this is not definitive proof of their also engaging in counterfeiting. However, counterfeiting was endemic to RI and Lopez’s line of business at this time.]
Absalom Miner married Mary Gorton of RI in 1797 and many of their children moved to Allegany County, NY alongside “Manassah”-branch cousins in neighboring Steuben county, where Josh first ran afoul of the law. Given contemporary press reports that identify Joshua D. Miner’s elders as inter-generational counterfeiters, and the unfortunate situation in Rhode Island, Absalom’s marriage suggests the typical pattern for inter-generational counterfeiting family networks.
There are two big clues linking Marinus to Joshua D. Miner:
1) Absalom’s son Marinus Willet had a son Charles M. who was the right age to be the less-successful counterfeiter brother “Charles M.” who we know Joshua D. Miner had.
2) Marinus Willet married in 1824 in Allegany County, which is also the year and general area of Joshua D.’s birth— Josh first got caught counterfeiting in Wayland, Steuben County, NY about 40 miles from where Marinus lived at Hume, Allegany County, NYC.
However, the Thomas Miner Society does not list Josh as one of Marinus’ children. It’s not uncommon for notorious criminals like Joshua D. to ‘fall out’ of the records of family histories. Criminals with high-level political connections can expect to have their civil records scrubbed as par for the course.
It goes without saying that a continued relationship with long-standing NYC-area counterfeiting networks, and their “legitimate” publishing industry covers, would explain the precocious careers of newspaperman William Wesley Young and his brother Art.
The Young/Miner family history gets even more interesting, because the area of Monroe, WI was settled in large part by people from Vermont in the 1830s, a few years after the Joseph Smith Jr. counterfeiting gang had to flee Vermont because their schemes were becoming too well known (1827). Joseph Smith Jr. continued counterfeiting and other types of organized crime while developing what became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or “Mormonism”.
To date, the only scholarly work focusing on Mormon connections with counterfeiting, horse-theft and other frauds is Melonakos’ Secret Combinations: Evidence of Early Mormon Counterfeiting 1800-1847, which I think should be read by anyone interested in the history of religion or organized crime in the U.S.A. Melonakos’ insight into the Joseph Smith family’s criminal past also gives insight to the history of Monroe, WI.
Rev. Miner was from Halifax, Windham County, Vermont (born 1815) and although he remarried twice while permanently settled in Monroe, he only ever sourced his wives from this small Vermont town. Another Bonelatta-era magnate, our top banker Arabut Ludlow, was born in Burlington, Chittenden Co., Vermont on 21 Jun 1818. He became Green County’s “pioneer peddler” and was engaged in such trade when Madison began issuing licenses for it in 1841. Joseph Smith Jr., scion of a multi-generational counterfeiting family and founder of Mormonism, was born in Sharon, VT in 1805. He began his criminal career at 14 years old.
Each of these towns is about 90 miles apart.
The Smith and connected gang families relied on a network of peddlers to distribute their fake bills around VT, NY and Pennsylvania prior to their gang being forced westward in 1827. Leading beneficiaries of the Bonelatta counterfeiting network, which overlapped with Mormon networks in the Southern Midwest, came from the territory where the old proto-Mormon gang dominated, at the time the gang dominated.
It would appear that at least some of Monroe, WI’s leading businessmen during the Bonelatta period would have at least had knowledge of the Smith Gang’s undertakings in their home state. To a large extent, Bonelatta Gang territory overlapped with previously-Mormon counterfeiting territories that the sect were forced to vacate having predated on their neighbors and been driven out (Missouri, Southern Iowa, Illinois). Not all Mormons left these areas after Joseph Smith Jr./Brigham Young took the bulk of followers onward to Salt Lake. For instance, from the History of Chickasaw County and Howard Counties, Iowa (1883):
In the Spring of 1847, [Brigham] Young and a portion of the colony pursued their journey to Salt Lake, but a large portion of them returned to the Iowa side and settled mainly within the limits of Pottawattamie County. The principal settlement of this strange community was at a place called "Miller's Hollow," on Indian Creek, and afterward named Kanesville, in honor of Col. Kane, of Pennsylvania, who visited them soon afterward. The Mormon settlement extended over the county and into neighboring counties, wherever timber and water furnished desirable locations. Orson Hyde, priest, lawyer and editor, was installed as President of the Quorum of Twelve, and all that part of the State remained under Mormon control for several years.
According the Brigham Young University/ Thomas Miner Society data, every branch of Miner/Minor family descendants intermarried with people surnamed ‘Young’, and judging by the presence of children named “Brigham”, at least some of these intertwined families were open to Mormon beliefs. So far I was able to find very little census or other civic record information for Daniel S. Young’s father Stephen, other than that he originated from New York state.
According to the Thomas Miner Society, patriarch Thomas’ descendants are well represented in Salt Lake City today:
SALT LAKE CITY — Most Utahns who can find the surname Miner in their genealogy are descendants of Thomas Minor (1608–1690) and Grace Palmer (ca. 1612–1690), early settlers of Massachusetts who later helped found New London and Stonington, Connecticut. Thomas kept a historically valuable diary and had a large posterity. People from several branches of the family migrated to Utah in the 19th century, and there are now thousands of Miner descendants living in Utah and surrounding states….
Most of the Minor/Miner relatives in the Mountain West descend from Thomas and Grace’s sons John and Clement. Many are the descendants of Albert Miner, a third great-grandson of Clement, whose family came to Utah in 1850 (he died en route) or of the brothers Edward, Leonidas, Ephraim and Lewis Mecham (fourth great-grandsons of Clement) who came to Utah in the 1850s. Many others descend from Elmira Pond (third great-granddaughter of John), who came to Utah in 1852 or from her sister Clarissa Pond, who died in 1844 before her children came to Utah. Others are the descendants of Aurelius Miner, a fourth great-grandson of John, who came West as a young lawyer in 1854.
One could view Napoleon Bonaparte Latta’s transfer to Monroe as his taking captainship of a “stay behind operation” of VT/NY counterfeiters who bridged the gulf between Mormon and mainstream society. When the Bonelatta Gang hit their stride, they did not specialize in the currency of local banks, but those from banks in upstate New York— i.e. the old stomping ground of the Smith network. The apparently peaceful coexistence of the two Midwest counterfeiting gangs with shared territories suggests that there was continued cooperation, if not mutual religious beliefs, between old Vermont friends into the 1870s. One could make the case, however, that Monroe’s Unitarian Universalists shared the same Protestant religious radical influences with Joseph Smith Jr.’s ‘pilgrim’ religion.
