Martha Craw – “Burnout”
My song “Burnout” (which most people just call “Martha”), tells the story of the night Martha Craw burned down the barn of a man named Frank Clark who allegedly seduced two of her daughters, and fathered both of their first children before running away to Montana. I heard snippets of the story at a family reunion while several family members were gathered in the Pioche Cemetery, and we found Martha’s grave. My dad started to tell what he remembered reading about Martha at one point. Fascinated, and thinking it might make a great song, I looked it up later and found Charles Leland Craw’s recorded version of the story. You can read his whole version of the story below. As you will recognize, I based my song very closely off of this story.
Before you start, keep in mind that a few details don’t entirely add up, (Craw notes this at the end of his story as well), but I’ll walk you through those details, and explain what I think happened (or could have happened) later. I’ll also provide my best evidence and some good old speculation.
Martha Elvira Sanford: Scorn (click link to read the story published online).
(This is written by Charles Leland Craw, and sent to Edwin Lee Brunt)
Dear cousin,
I have written this story as it was told to me by my father many years ago. My father died in 1965 and I didn’t put the story on paper until some years later. Please don’t be offended by this story. There are stories about my grandfather in Pioche, which I wish were not true also.
A brief synopsis of my immediate family. I am 73 years old and a retired electrical engineer I have been married 47 years to a wonderful woman and we have 5 children, 1 son and 4 daughters. We have 15 grandchildren and no great grand children as yet. We live in Richmond, Utah very near the Idaho border in extreme northern Utah. I guess both our families love the mountains. This story is quite long. I hope it goes on the email okay.
Grandma Craw’s burnout in Pioche by Charles Leland Craw is a story about Martha Elvira Sanford Craw, who with her husband and family came to Pioche, Nevada from San Bernardino, California in 1872, having been driven from San Bernardino by raiding Indians my grandfather, Charles Lewis Craw, was eight years old at the time. The story is true; however some details have been lost in the obscurity of time and the retelling of the story through three generations of the family.
Pioche was a new rip-roaring, snorting, hell raising, boomtown in 1872, and there were all sorts of unsavory characters hanging around the town. There were hired guns employed to jump claims or even kill miners, if necessary to get their claims from them. It was necessary to be tough to survive in that kind of environment.
Hyrum Lewis Craw, Martha’s husband, was a freighter by trade and he was supporting his family by hauling supplies and food to the hordes of miners, who had flocked to the new bonanza.
Four or five years after moving to Pioche, the oldest girls were at the age when young people begin to court and get married, and they began to see some of the young men in the community. Eventually both girls confessed to their mother that they were both, with child. It only required a few questions to reveal that they were both pregnant by the same man. The man’s name was Frank Clark, and he had been seeing each girl without the other one knowing about it. Frank Clark had a ranch a few miles from Pioche. When he was approached about the problem he wouldn’t accept any responsibility for the girls’ condition and refused to have anything more to do with either one of them. Martha Sanford Craw was not one to take this kind of thing passively, so she bided her time, and watched and patiently waited for an opportunity to give Frank Clark some of his own medicine. Finally one stormy winter night the opportunity came. It was snowing hard, and any tracks would be obliterated by the snow in just a few minutes. Martha took a gallon can of kerosene and got on her old pinto horse and rode the few miles to Frank Clark’s ranch.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and Martha’s two daughters had been scorned. It was a bitter cold night and a blinding blizzard, but Martha was a woman with a purpose and that purpose was to make Frank Clark pay for the wrongs he had inflicted upon her daughters. When she got to the ranch, there was no one there; Frank Clark was in Pioche enjoying the revelry at one of the many saloons. Working quickly she poured a ring of kerosene around the house and barn touched a match to it, she watched for a few seconds to see that it was burning good, then got back on old pinto and rode through the blizzard to her home in Pioche.
When Frank Clark returned home he found a large pile of smoldering ashes, and he knew the girls had been avenged. He sold out the next day for what he could get on short notice and left for Montana to try to make a new start.
This story may seem rather harsh in this day and age, but at that time there was very little law and for the most part people had to take care of their problems their self. Family legend has it that Grandma Craw always carried a small derringer pistol under her petticoat for protection. This is not surprising, considering the lawless, rough environment she lived in.
Grandma Craw also had a gentle side to her nature. She wrote poetry and was a loving wife and mother. She was very protective of her family and had an unconquerable spirit. She had seven daughters and two sons. She had many tragic experiences and was introduced to grief early in her life with the death of their first child, a girl just a few days old. Her husband died in 1903 at 65 years of age, and her oldest son Charlie died in 1912 of a cancerous growth in his throat at 48 years old, and her son Net was killed in a mine accident in Pioche in 1916, when he was only 45 years old. She mourned the early death of her sons until her own death in 1919 at 79 years old. Some of the stories and deeds attributed to her may seem harsh today, but remember that as I stated earlier you had to be tough in order to survive, and grandma craw was a survivor.
***The story above, that Charlie Craw wrote, is about, as written, Martha Jane Craw (1860 – 1919) and Phoebe Melisia Craw (1862 – 1938) and Martha’s first son, Franklin H. Garrison (1877 – 1942). But now that I reread it and see Franks Clark’s name leads me to believe that it is in fact not about two of Martha Elvira’s daughters, but just one, Rose May, and would have taken place in late 1895, early 1896, when Martha was about 55.
Of course, the story was too good pass up. I immediately worked it into poetic form and built verses and choruses. This was the first time I’d ever written a song based on a true story or my family history. It took some time, and I hated it at first. My mom encouraged me to keep going, and eventually it all came together into what has definitely become an audience favorite.
After performing it several times, however, people began to question whether the story was true. I remember one time, in particular, that I received a message from a woman claiming that she knew Frank Clark, and that he was a good man. After a few moments I realized that the likelihood that she knew THIS Frank Clark who would have been in his 20s in 1895 was probably pretty slim. Regardless, I decided that whether Frank Clark was a good man or not, I wanted to confirm what details I could about the story so that I could at least answer questions honestly.
Most of my investigating consisted of looking at birth and death dates of the characters involved, especially Martha’s daughters and their children. I was able to piece together a decent record that Martha’s two youngest daughters (Rose and Emma) both had children who were conceived out of wedlock and born in late 1895 and early 1896. I could not prove, of course, that Frank Clark was the father of either of those children, so I had to chalk much of the story up to speculation.
But then, my dad found some newspaper clippings that started to add extra support to Craw’s story:
For example, this newspaper clipping from the Pioche Weekly Record shows that Frank Clark’s barn did indeed burn down when no one was at home. You can click on the image to see the full newspaper page in the library of congress archives.
It doesn’t confirm that it happened in the middle of the night or that Frank left town afterwards. There’s no proof that Martha lit that match, but there is evidence that the barn and surrounding area were destroyed in a fire while the occupants were away, and not long after Martha’s daughters became pregnant.
Next, another piece of evidence emerged. My dad found record that Hyrum Craw sued Frank Clark for the seduction of his daughter, Rose Craw. This confirms the suspicion that the story was about Martha’s younger daughter(s), and definitely helps the timeline make a bit more sense. Again, clicking the image will take you to the Library of Congress record and the full newspaper page.
According to these clips, the story, if true, must just about one of Martha’s daughters, just like Charles Leland Craw’s story suggests in the endnote. Maybe Frank really only seduced Rose Craw. Otherwise there would be two daughters listed in the lawsuit in the Pioche Weekly, wouldn’t there? Well. I don’t know. I speculate two possibilities. One is that Rose is the only daughter who was involved with Frank Clark, but that Martha’s daughters Rose and Emma both became pregnant out of wedlock around the same time. Perhaps the difference was that Emma ended up marrying the father of her child (Joseph or “Guiseppe” Matli, but Rose didn’t marry Frank Clark. Maybe Martha wasn’t upset that Frank seduced two daughters, but that Frank refused to “do the right thing,” and marry the mother of his child. The reason I suspect this is that Emma was Married in late December of 1895 and had her first son in mid February of 1896. This means Emma would have likely been about 4 months pregnant the night Frank’s barn burned down, and 7 months pregnant when she married Joseph (Guiseppe) Matli. It’s probably most likely that Matli is the father of her firstborn son, Albert, but she and Rose would have both been pregnant out of wedlock around the same time.
Rose definitely had her first child, Frank, in November of 1895, but there are a few curious details emerging over the last few years about Rose’s timeline. Looking at the genealogical records on Family Search, her first child’s name was originally added as Frank A Clark. Later, that child’s name was changed by a Family Search user to Frank Aril Varner, and a man named Frank P Varner was added as the child’s father, and he is designated as her “preferred” spouse, but no marriage date is listed. In fact, there is no record of a marriage until 1899 when she marries a man named Druey Varner. There is no record of Druey’s death date; he is simply listed as deceased. My father speculates that Frank Clark may have changed his name after the lawsuit (as he’s heard was common practice), and perhaps is both Frank Varner and Druey Varner. Neither Frank nor Druey Varner is connected to any parents or family other than Rose and her sons. Druey is listed somewhere on Family Search as the adoptive father of Rose’s son Frank. They had another son together named Druey who is buried with Martha and Hyrum (the grandparents). I’m still digging into the story to see if I can find any more legal records or new stories that could help confirm or negate my theories. As a side note, Rose finally remarries in 1911 to a man named Ben Harris, so we can assume this Varner character has passed away by this time.
With current evidence as it stands, my other theory is that the story is possibly true as Charles Leland Craw told it, and since Emma was able to marry more quickly, Hyrum left him alone, and sued Frank Clark for abandoning Rose. Like my father, I’ve also wondered if Frank did eventually marry Rose and take care of the child, under a different name.
What’s more likely? Probably the idea that they were two separate men: a Clark who seduced Rose, and a Varner who married her, but the evidence corroborating Charles Leland Craw’s version of the story and the timelines do make me wonder how much of the story happened exactly as he said.
Update 6/7/2026: I’ve been researching a bit more. I believe Druey and Frank Varner are definitely the same person. Druey or “Drewery” Varner is the name on Rose Craw’s marriage license, but in the Pioche Weekly Record, in October of 1899, there is a report that Rose is to marry Frank Varner on November first of that year (just a couple weeks later). On a Nevada marriages record, Frank Varner and Rose Craw are listed with the same wedding date as the marriage license and newspapers recorded. The November 2nd, 1899 edition of the Pioche Weekly Record reports that Rose married Druey Varner the day before that paper was published (November 1st). In her father’s obituary, Rose is called Mrs. Frank Varner. There are several mentions of Frank Varner in the newspaper which seem to reference her husband. I believe that his legal name must have been Druey or something of the like (looks like Drewery Otis Varner on the marriage license), but that he was known as Frank throughout the community. I do not have any verifiable reason to believe that Frank Clark and Frank Varner are the same person. In 1905, Frank Clark appears to have married a woman named Minnie, and he also appears to have committed suicide about 10 years after that marriage (documented in this obituary). He was in Las Vegas at the time, but was buried in Salt Lake City. I’m not sure what to make of what that means for the story. It sounds like Frank Clark did not leave Nevada for Montana or at least, I can find no record of that.
I did find, however, census records listing Rose’s first child as Frank A. Clark or Frank Aril Clark, and stating that he is Frank Varner’s stepson. It is not until I see Frank’s military registration that he appears under the name Frank A Varner. By that time, he has listed his mother as single, and as his dependent. This would be before she marries William Ben Harris in 1911.
So I’m still convinced that Frank Clark is, indeed, the father of Rose’s first born child. The only remaining mysteries are who exactly is Frank/Druey Varner and where does he come from? And was Emma ever actually seduced by Frank Clark after all, or did that part of the story emerge because both daughters were pregnant out of wedlock, but two different men were responsible? And just a small, possibly tin-foil-hat-wearing part of me wonders “If Frank/Druey Varner appears out of nowhere, and disappears into nowhere while Frank Clark has clear existence and documentation for life events… is it at all possible that Varner was an alias he took on after the seduction and lawsuit, and then he returned to the name Frank Clark later in life?” That’s crazy, I suppose. After all, both Clark and Craw remarry in the early 1900s before Frank Clark kills himself. But there is no record of divorce between Varner and Craw, and there is no listed death date for Varner. Is it possible that they split and Varner returned to an old name? That’s probably crazy talk, but you know I’ll be building a timeline of the names Frank Clark and Frank/Druey Varner, now. I really shouldn’t speculate.
So, instead of speculating, I’m accumulating all the documentation I can find into this timeline, and I’ll let you decide for yourselves.