He dropped out of political life once more in 1862 and retired to his farm (Sailor's Hope) where he would live out his remaining years in the company of a grandson, William Cooper Morrow, the oldest child of Malvina and James Morrow who, according to the Royal Gazette, had died in California of cholera in 1851.

The local people feel that this boy did not accompany his parents on the voyage of “The Packet” but was left behind with his paternal grandparents on P.E.l. He later became his grandfather’s only heir with the conditions that he would drop the surname Morrow and use Cooper only, and that he would conduct himself as becomes a good member of society.

Young Morrow apparently complied with the first two conditions at least. He used the name William Cooper and married Maria Jenkins, the daughter of James Jenkins, another shipbuilder of Little Pond. it is not as clear whether he was actually a good member of society, since he was remembered as rather a

villain by Bridget Poore, a young Irish girl who was a dairy maid at the Cooper residence about the time Cooper, Sr, died.

She related stories of her experiences to her daughter Mary (Bob) Mac- Donald who in turn handed down those same stories to a daughter—in-law, Maybelle MacDonald, Little Pond, Bridget said the house had an evil feeling and the maids had a terrible fear of young Cooper. A great deal of mystery sur- rounded the Cooper family. Bridget later married William Blackett of Annandale and has one surviving daughter, Elizabeth, Montague, aged 93.

One of the sources on which we based this article was previous research done by Eileen MacKie, Howe Bay and Marlene MacDonald, Little Pond, for an Island History Course at Souris Regional High School. Marlene, a young girl dearly loved by the whole community died after surgery to correct a congenital spine defect in St. John’s, Nfld., on June 25, 1975, in her eighteenth year. Eileen is presently employed on the staff of a hospital in Banff, Alberta in the dietary department. The girls wrote a ballad called “William Cooper” from which the following excerpt made up two verses.

To Fortune Church they brought

His remains to lay to rest

The small white stone says so much and leaves, The memories of a man who helped all people On this island in the Sea.

May he rest in Heaven for his deeds.

A cemetery stone is all that is left to mark the life and death of the ill-fated William Cooper. His grandson William Cooper sold the estate and moved to Western USA. where, accompanied by his wife, he operated a store in Oregon for Several years. The rest of Cooper’s family who had sailed on The Packet in 1850 settled in California, some of them died in a cholera epidemic, three sons were killed by Indians, so it appears life was not kind to them either. One is left to ponder how different things might have been had this family unit stayed together at Sailor’s Hope. We can. imagine that some of Howe Bay’s prominent citizens of today could have been Coopers, a name vanished forever.

7