Who Was Kansas Charley?

German Immigrant Born as Karl Muller

Aug 15, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion

Kansas Charley's parents were German immigrants. When Charley was five his mother died. His father, while bartending, was quickly becoming a drunk.

Who was the orphaned boy from New York City whose execution in Cheyenne, Wyoming made headlines in newspapers such as the New York World on April 23, 1892? Well, for one thing Charley Miller, known as Kansas Charley, was a murderer. But a lot of things happened to Charley before that dastardly deed was done.

The Birth of Kansas Charley

To begin with, Charley Miller was born on November 20, 1874. The abode of his birth was a dinky and dingy apartment at 248 West 37th Street in Manhattan. It was a tenement that was crowded with a mixture of German and Irish immigrants. Charley was the third child born to Frederick and Marie Elise Muller. They named the boy 'Karl' and spoke their native German to him and his two older siblings. On the trip to America Mrs. Muller had given birth to Caroline in 1872. A year later Frederick was born.

An American Dream Goes Sour

Prospects for a good new life in America surely looked rosy to the Mullers at first. But that was going to change and very soon. Kansas Charlie's father could not find work in is usual trade as a nickel-plater. Mr. Muller took employment in a neighborhood saloon. Soon Muller was imbibing heavily in his own liquid commodity. Then a fourth child was born to the Mullers, William, in 1877, stretching the Muller earnings more worryingly thin.

Three years later, on January 20, 1880, Kansas Charlie's mother died suddenly of a "miscarriage and septicemia." Charlie was five years old when he lost his mother.

What would now become of Charley and his brothers and sister now that they had no mother to look after them and a father that needed to work long hours to provide for them? Mr. Muller did have an alternative to attempting to keep the family together. In the late 1880s, in cities such as New York, it was not out of the ordinary, in such situations, for a single parent to elect to put their children in an orphanage, even temporarily.

This road, at least physically, would have been the easy trail to take.

Who was Kansas Charley? German Immigrant Born as Karl Muller, continues with Kansas Charley Becomes an Orphan: Death to be Taken Lightly.

Previous: The Saga of Kansas Charley: The Boy Murder.

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