Harry Rantz and Thula Rantz’s marriage

Harry Rantz and Thula Rantz’s marriage gives Harry a new household after years of loss, but its promise of stability is gradually overtaken by separation, hardship, and conflict over Joe Rantz. Their union begins with a shared hope of rebuilding family life; it ends, in the episodes presented, with Harry unable to keep both his wife and his older son under one roof, and Joe left behind.

Courtship and a new household

In 1919, Harry returned from Canada, bought a lot in Spokane, and began building a house as he tried to piece his life back together. He wanted a wife to make the new house a home. Thula, the younger of twin sisters from a prosperous eastern Washington wheat-farming family, was twenty-two; Harry was seventeen years older. His attraction is presented as readily understandable, while the reasons for hers puzzled her family. He was handsome and worldly, restless and mechanically inventive, and spoke about the future with a visionary force that could make other people imagine what he imagined. For Thula, raised in an isolated farmhouse among wheat fields, that energy may have suggested a life beyond the narrow horizon she knew, although the narrative does not claim certainty about her feelings.

Harry completed the Spokane house, and in April 1921 he and Thula slipped across the state line and married on the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The elopement displeased Thula’s parents. It also created an unusual family arrangement: Thula became the mother-in-law of her own twin sister, who had married Harry’s son Fred. For Joe, the marriage meant leaving Fred’s home in Nezperce and moving in with a father he barely knew and a stepmother he did not know at all. The marriage therefore joined two adults seeking a home while requiring a child to make yet another adjustment.

At first, the Spokane house seemed to offer the family a measure of normal life. It was spacious, bright, and fragrant with fresh-sawn wood. On warm evenings, Harry, Thula, and Joe could all fit on the backyard swing. Harry kept Nellie Maxwell’s parlor grand piano, her most precious possession, and played popular songs with Joe, who sang along. Thula, an accomplished violinist, regarded their musical taste as coarse and did not join them. Her own practice filled the afternoons: classical pieces drifted through screened windows while Joe was at school and Harry at work. Even in this early domestic scene, the marriage contains two distinct artistic worlds and a treasured object connecting Harry to his first marriage.

Work, isolation, and unequal prospects

The birth of Harry and Thula’s first son in January 1922 and their second in April 1923 enlarged the household, but by the younger boy’s birth family life had begun to fray. Harry had spent the previous year living and working weekdays at an Idaho gold mine, then driving 140 miles on twisting mountain roads to Spokane each Friday in his long, black Franklin touring convertible. He returned to Idaho on Sunday afternoon. The job used his mechanical skills and provided steady income, which mattered to him as mass production and cheap labor reshaped the prospects of inventive workers. For Thula, the same arrangement meant long weeks alone, without help or adult company at dinner, caring for an infant, a toddler, and a guarded young stepson.

The strain was not only the distance between Harry’s work and home. Thula had been educated and artistic, and her family had expected her to become a first violinist in a major symphony orchestra. In Boulder City, that future seemed remote. Her social circle consisted largely of the wives of sawyers and miners, and the conditions of the cabin made practice difficult: winter cold stiffened her fingers; summer dryness cracked and sorely irritated them. The violin sat unused while she washed dishes and diapers. The contrast with her twin sister’s comfortable home sharpened Thula’s sense that the life she had entered was not the life she had imagined. The account presents this disappointment as part of the pressure on the marriage, not as proof that either spouse alone caused its failure.

Domestic friction also surfaced in small, physical routines. Harry sometimes tracked grease and sawdust into the cabin after work. One chilly evening Thula shrieked at the sight of his dirty overalls and sent him back outside to wash at Boulder Creek. Harry stripped down to his long underwear, went barefoot along the rocky trail, and thereafter bathed in the creek whatever the season or temperature, carrying his boots inside and draping the overalls over his arm. The routine shows both the material conditions of their life and a household rule imposed by Thula that Harry accepted. Yet her authority over the cabin did not resolve the deeper isolation: her thwarted musical ambitions and daily labor continued, while his work kept him away for most of each week.

Joe becomes the point of rupture

The marriage’s most consequential conflict centers on Joe. Thula worried that her own children would not get enough to eat, while Joe was growing quickly and consumed food as fast as she could prepare it. In Boulder City, Joe’s vegetable garden gave him a small domain of responsibility and pride; the produce he carried inside helped feed the household. But when eighteen-month-old Mike followed him into the garden and pulled up half-grown carrots, Joe shouted in anger. Thula rushed from the porch, picked up Mike, and shut herself and the child inside.

When Harry came home, Thula demanded that he take Joe out of sight and give him a severe beating. Instead, Harry took his son upstairs and talked to him. Thula saw this as lax discipline. Her frustration escalated into an ultimatum: she would not live under the same roof as Joe, and he had to leave if she was to stay. Harry could not calm her and could not bear the thought of losing a second wife. He told ten-year-old Joe that he would have to move out.

The consequence was immediate and practical. The next morning Harry led Joe to the schoolhouse at the top of the hill and arranged with the teacher for him to sleep there in return for chopping kindling and splitting enough wood to keep the stone fireplace burning day and night. Joe also had to earn his meals at the company cookhouse, carrying food to the dining hall and washing the miners’ dishes. Thula’s demand thus changed the marriage’s domestic structure by expelling Harry’s older son from the home; Harry’s response preserved his household with Thula and the younger boys at the cost of Joe’s place in it.

Separation and the limits of reconciliation

A later confrontation makes the choice still more explicit. Harry tells Joe that the family cannot make it where they are, that Thula will not stay, and that she is insisting on leaving. He is uncertain where they will go, naming Seattle for the present and California as a possibility. He also tells Joe that Thula wants him to remain behind, and that Harry himself will go with her because the younger children need a father more than Joe does. Joe asks if he can come along; Harry refuses. The scene repeats the earlier pattern on a larger scale: Thula’s refusal to remain with Joe sets the terms, and Harry accommodates it, now by leaving Joe rather than merely removing him from the house.

The marriage is not shown here reaching a formal legal conclusion. What the narrative does establish is its changing consequence for the family: a union begun in the hope of making a home becomes the reason Joe is first exiled from that home and later left behind again. Harry’s practical concessions—working away, accepting Thula’s demand about Joe, and finally departing with her and the younger children—keep the marriage and younger household together in the short term, but do not restore the father-son bond. The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved division: the promise of a shared home remains, while the family’s belonging is divided by whom Harry can take with him.