Wild Goose Bill Days

A May weekend in City Park

Wilbur is a wheat town in Lincoln County, 65 miles west of Spokane and 21 miles southeast of Grand Coulee Dam. On the third weekend in May it holds Wild Goose Bill Days in City Park, on the streets of town, and in the Community Center. The Wilbur Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1914, runs the celebration and says it draws hundreds of visitors each spring.

The program has included a parade and the Wild Goose Chase, a 3.5-mile race. There have been coaster car races, mini moto races, a chalk drawing contest, a children’s fishing derby, golf, and the Show-N-Shine Car Show. The Lions Club holds a barbecue in the park, food and craft vendors set up, and the Friends of the Library sell used books. The firemen hold an auction. There is a museum presentation, and the list ends with Golden Garter Music and Dancing.

The town calendar listed the 2026 celebration for Saturday, May 16, from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. The chamber gives the 2027 dates as May 14, 15 and 16; its printed event list shows May 14 and 15.

The festival honors Samuel Wilbur Condon, known as Wild Goose Bill, who founded the town. In May 1995 the celebration ran from Thursday through Saturday and marked the hundredth anniversary of the shootout in which he died. “Every small town has a community festival,” John Craig wrote in The Spokesman-Review that week, “but few have such a colorful character to commemorate as Wilbur’s Wild Goose Bill Condon.”

A man of several names

He was Condit at birth, born in New Jersey. His Find a Grave memorial places the birth at Orange. That memorial and HistoryLink give the year as 1833, while other accounts say about 1835. The Spokesman-Review says he left home at 17. By its account he became Condon either to shed a disagreeable childhood or because a Chinese worker made a mistake filing a land claim for him. The name also appears as Conden.

A history published by the town says he made and lost two fortunes in the California gold fields and was known there as “Dancing Bill.” By HistoryLink’s account and that of his friend Major R. D. Gwydir, he reached Washington Territory in 1856; the newspaper says about 1860. He went into freighting out of Walla Walla, at first running a pack business for a gambler and later holding a share of it.

Gwydir was an Indian agent on the Colville Reservation in the late 1880s. Writing in 1912, he described his friend this way: “Tall, gaunt, and slightly stooped, invariably wearing a red bandana loosely knotted around his neck, and a slouch hat; he was a typical frontiersman. Impulsive and generous, warm in his friendships and bitter in his enmities, quick to anger, but ever ready to acknowledge errors and to make reparation.” The Wilbur pioneer Holgar Jurgensen described Bill more briefly, as a very good friend and a very bad enemy.

Geese on the Walla Walla road

The nickname comes with several stories.

• Gwydir’s version. Bill fired “into a large flock of tame geese owned by a settler between Walla Walla and Colville under the impression they were wild.” The owner had brought the eggs all the way from Oregon. She followed him home, “delivering all the way a scathing tirade against the stupidity of a man who pretended to be a frontiersman and didn’t know the difference between a wild goose and a tame one.”
• Al Thorpe’s version. Bill’s sidekick set the story at a tavern called Seventy Mile House, where the proprietor had tamed a brood of wild geese on a little lake by the road. Bill knew the birds were tame but was hungry for goose, and he began picking them off with his revolver. The proprietor ran out shouting, “Them’s my geese! Them’s my geese!” Without looking around, Bill dropped another and told him to “keep still or I’ll get the whole flock.”
• The Find a Grave version. An old Indian woman who had hatched the geese herself came out haranguing him and waving her arms.
• The Wenatchee Valley Museum version. The woman had set her hens on the goose eggs. She came running, swearing in Chinook and threatening to shoot, and he ran for his life.

The Spokesman-Review found one thread common to all of them: he shot up a gaggle of domestic geese with his revolver.

A ferry, a cable, and a town site

The “History of the Big Bend” gives an account of how he found the valley, and the town’s history says it is believed to have happened on the way back from selling supplies to Chinese miners near Lake Okanogan. He stood on the ridge south of present-day Wilbur and looked down on a clear stream fringed with aspens, willows, and cottonwood. When the placer gold declined, he sold his pack train and came back to stay.

The accounts differ on when he settled:

• The Wenatchee Valley Museum puts a trading post there around 1870.
• HistoryLink and The Spokesman-Review have him ranching on the flat near Goose Creek by 1875.

He built a log cabin a story and a half high. His ranch became the stopover for travelers heading north, whether by wagon, on horseback, or on foot. He ran a post office on the place from February 25, 1885, to June 22, 1886.

His larger business was on the Columbia, about 18 miles downriver from the present site of Grand Coulee Dam. There he kept a trading post and a ferry, which Gwydir wrote was still known as “Wild Goose Bill’s Ferry.”

• The ferries. The first ferry was rowed by oar and held a single wagon and team. A larger one, about 16 feet wide and 60 feet long, was built at the sawmills at the mouth of Hawk Creek and floated downriver.
• The cable. In the winter of 1886–87 he hauled a steel cable overland from Sprague, stretched over two wagons. The cold had laid heavy ice on the river, and he used it to string the cable across.
• Tolls and trade. He charged toll on a crude bridge over the Okanogan and on his road to Ruby City. He also owned one of the few sets of gold scales in the territory.

In 1888 word came that the Central Washington Railroad would pass through. Condit deeded a half-interest in his land to the railroad in return for a share of the proceeds from lot sales and a depot on the townsite, and the town site was platted in 1889. Three sawmills ran at full capacity and still could not keep up. According to the town’s history, the railroad’s arrival also cost packers like him much of their business.

The Spokane Chronicle reported in 1936 that the town might have been called Goose Town. Nannie Robertson, the wife of a pioneer blacksmith, declared she would not live in a place by that name, and civic leaders took her suggestion to use the founder’s middle name instead. Wilbur became officially incorporated on August 11, 1890.

Two fires followed:

• October 4, 1891. A kerosene lamp left burning in Damian Wagner’s house on Main Street exploded. His wife and three of their children died.
• July 5, 1901. An oil explosion in the basement of the Hay brothers’ store burned much of the town. Marion Hay, then Wilbur’s mayor, later became Washington’s seventh governor.

Both times the town rebuilt.

Bill’s cabin was sold in the 1890s and moved down Main Street. When a later owner planned to raze it, Jurgensen led a movement to save it, and it was moved to the municipal farm at the west end of town. It stood there until it burned to the ground.

Three feet of snow, January 1895

His first wife, Julia, bore him sons; the accounts give two or three. The Spokesman-Review says he was reputed to have killed several Coeur d’Alene Indians who tried to interfere in his domestic affairs. His second wife, Mary Ann, was of the San Poil band according to the newspaper and of Chief Moses’ band according to the town’s history. She bore Charlie, a severely disabled boy whom Bill adored.

In 1893 Mary Ann left him and his freighter quit. He hired a man named Elwell to haul freight, and Elwell’s daughter, Millie Dunn, to keep house and care for Charlie. She was in her twenties and he was in his sixties. He meant to marry her. In the winter of 1895 she went instead with her lover, Jack Bratton, to Bratton’s cabin on the Hollis King ranch north of Wilbur, taking her young son, James Sykes.

In 1953 Sykes told The Spokesman-Review what happened next; he was the last living eyewitness.

• The warning. It was bleak and cold, with about three feet of snow on the ground. Millie’s sister had come out the day before to warn her that Condon was coming. Millie was sure he loved her too much to harm her, and she stayed. Bratton left.
• The wait. A young hired man named Barton Park stayed behind; the name also appears as Parks and Burton Park. He put a rifle under his blanket and lay on his bunk with a revolver at his side.
• Condon’s arrival. Burt Woodin drove up with Condon in a cutter. Condon walked in without knocking, sat the boy on a box, gave him candy, and asked whether he would come live with him. “He always treated me kindly,” Sykes said.
• The proposal. Condon put the boy behind the cookstove with both oven doors pulled open for cover, then asked Millie whether she would marry him. She said no. The newspaper’s account gives his answer as “All right, then, damn you, I’ll kill you”; the version printed by the town gives “All right, then, I will kill you!”
• The shooting. She threw her arms over her face, and two bullets from his Hopkins and Allen .44 went through her arm. Park opened fire. Condon fired back, backed toward the door, and fell dead through it, face-down in the snow. Mortally wounded, Park shot one of Condon’s companions in the heel at 200 yards. Then he knelt at the foot of his bunk and said to Millie, “I’ve done all in this world I can do for you.” He died with his head on his arms.

The doctor was out of town, so a veterinarian dressed Millie’s wounds. She went back to Bratton. A jury convicted him of gross lewdness and fined him $60, which Dunn is said to have paid by mortgaging horses Condon had given her.

Condon left most of his fortune, around $15,000, to Charlie, with the money to pass to the Wilbur school fund after Charlie’s death. Charlie died in March 1899. Condon’s second wife then challenged the will and won in the state Supreme Court, and lawyers got half the money.

Shortly before he set out after Millie, according to the Wenatchee Valley Museum account, he had written in his will: “If I am killed before returning home, I shall die with my boots on, and I want to be buried in the sand pit below my ferry business.” He was buried in Wilbur Cemetery.