Kansas Charley Becomes an Orphan
Life at the Orphanage and Loss of Siblings
Aug 14, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion
A Father's Suicide
Kansas Charlie's father, after the death of his wife, kept his family together and continued working in a New York saloon. The children were left to look after themselves and to help their father. Fred and Charley, who were now six and five, roamed the street seeking anything of value that had been dropped. Their older sister of eight years stepped in as a poor but willing substitute mother, preparing meals, doing the family wash, carrying water and worse. In time, Charlie's father became despondent, often speaking of killing himself to end his miseries. He did so, in 1881, by drinking Paris Green, an insecticide that was some 45 percent arsenic.
Life at the Orphanage
On April 1, 1881, Charley Muller, with his brothers and sister, was admitted to the New York City Orphan Asylum. Their father had committed suicide six days previous. No longer would the boy named Karl Muller by his parents be known by that name. He was now Charley Miller. He was six years old.
At the New York Orphanage the Miller children, Carrie, Fred, Charley, and Willie Miller, had clean clothes, clean beds, clean bodies, and schooling. What they did not have was the love of a mother, or that of a father although it seems they had had very little of the latter.
Charley, as well as his siblings, also received the rudiments of an education, including the study of the Bible. Charley learned to read, a talent that may have vastly contributed to his ultimate downfall.
Good-bye Sister, Good-bye Brothers
In 1882, Charlie's sister was sent from the orphanage to take a position as a domestic worker. Charley now had one less sibling near him on a daily basis. Four years later, in 1886, Fred left. He went west by train with a group of orphans to be adopted. It was an episode in American History that became known as the "orphan trains." Fred was bound for St. Louis, Missouri and then Kansas.
Now, of the Miller children, only Charley and his younger brother Willie were left at the orphanage. Then when Willie was twelve the Kansas family that had adopted Fred requested that Willie be sent to them also. But even before Charlie's sister and brothers began to leave the orphanage he had a major, and at the time incurable, problem. It was a situation that would win him no friends now or in the future.
An Incurable and Embarrassing Condition
Charley Miller was a bed-wetter. It was not a pleasant situation in an orphanage where cleanliness was stressed and numerous waifs lived in close quarters. Bed-wetting was a condition that was little understood in the late 1800's.
The couple that ran the orphanage where Charlie lived demanded that his bed-wetting stop. And Charlie was told that bed-wetting was a disease. Some years later while Charlie waited in a Cheyenne, Wyoming jail to be hung for murder, he was asked how he was treated in the orphanage. His reply was that he was whipped very often because he had a disease, meaning bed-wetting, that he couldn't stop.
While still in the orphanage a doctor believed that Charlie's problem was caused by one or several conditions that included defects in the urethra, kidney, bladder, or penis. It was also widely believed that bed-wetting was the results of masturbation, then referred to as "self-abuse."
Passing Time Solves No Problems
Even as Charley neared his twelfth birthday, the time for normally being put out of the orphanage, the bed-wetting continued. The situation could become a total disaster were he placed with a family. But there was one drastic medical procedure that had, at least in one single case, cured another boy of bed-wetting-circumcision, not regularly done, in the non-Jewish sector, in that day and age.
Kansas Charley continues with: Kansas Charley Reaches Puberty
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