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Joseph & Minnie Huber Minnie was the oldest of 14
children. Her parents immigrated to the United States in
1867, when Minnie was about four years old. Joseph arrived in
1880 at the age of 25. He and Minnie married in Ellsworth
Co., Kansas in 1883. They were still living in Kansas when
their first child, a daughter, was born in 1884 or 1885. A
family source says the child died of diphtheria when she was two or
three.
Minnie's parents, along with several of her younger siblings, moved from Kansas to Texas around the same time that Minnie and Joseph, but not before March 1, 1885. They were enumerated in a Kansas State census on that date. They were living in Denton, Texas, when Minnie's mother gave birth to twin girls on February 16, 1887. One of the girls was stillborn. Another child, Sarah, died four months later at the age of two. She is buried in Denton's Oakwood Cemetery. After moving to Denison, Texas, Minnie gained employment as a housekeeper for W.B. Boss and Joseph was employed by Boss as well as a miller in his Lone Star Flour Mill. W.B. Boss arrived in the new town of Denison in September 1872; there he established a lumber business and was a respected citizen of the town. Boss and his wife, Margaret, along with their two children lived on the southwest corner of Day Street and Lamar Avenue. On Thursday, August 13, 1885, former Denison Mayor, W.B. Boss, aged 53, was arrested by Grayson Co. Constable A.W. Mixon. Two days later he was formally indicted at the county courthouse in Sherman on a charge of forcibly raping his housekeeper, Minnie Huber, aged 21. The claim that formed the basis for the indictment was made by Minnie's husband, Joseph Huber, aged 31.   Boss's friends proclaimed his
innocence and acused the Hubers of attempted blackmail.
 At
the trial in Sherman on Friday, December 3, the jury deliberated for
less than 10 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty.
  Seven months later, when the 1887
- 1888 Denison City Directory was compiled, the Hubers were no longer
in town. Since the Hubers left Denison before mid-1886, it is
estimated that they were in town for no more than a year or two.
It may have been for only a few months.
At some point between 1887 and 1910, Minnie's parents moved more than a hundred miles west to Bluegrove, about 11 miles south of Henrietta. Minnie's father died and was buried there in 1910; her mother died in 1919 and is buried in Henrietta. In December of 1887 Minnie and Joseph had their second child in Westport, Missouri, on the southern edge of Kansas City. If the couple did attempt to shake down their boss, they apparently learned their lesson. For the next four or five decades they led lives of ostensible respectability. Their three surviving children grew up to lead respectable, law-abiding lives. Other than the rape charge no reports of seriously illegal conduct by W.B. Boss appear in any newspapers. He was, by all accounts save one, an esteemed member of his community. If he was falsely accused by Minnie Huber, he was fortunate that his twelve white male peers quickly saw through her story and vindicated him.  Contrary to his reported
intentions in The
Sunday Gazetteer, William B. Boss did not leave Denison as
soon as his trial ended. He and his wife Margaret left in the
early 1890s, although it is difficult to say precisely when their
departure became permanent. They stayed for extended periods
in Sedalia, Missouri, St. Louis, Chicago, and Findlay, Ohio.
They also returned to Texas several times for lengthy visits
through the end of the 1890s and well into the following decade.
They did not sell their house at the corner of Lamar Avenue
and Day Street until 1908. Margaret Boss died in Findlay,
Ohio, in 1914. William moved from Findlay to Illinois after
his wife's death, perhaps to live with or near his step-daughter and
her husband. He sold four more lots in Denison in 1917.
After his death in Chicago in 1921, his body was transported
back to Findlay for burial
next to Margaret.
By 1891 Minnie and Joseph had moved back to Texas from Missouri. They were living in Seymour, southwest of Wichita Falls, when their third child, Emma, was born.  Their
fourth and last child, Fred, was born in Hillsboro, Oregon, in January
1894. The family had settled in Oregon; the 1900 Census shows
them in
Pendleton where Joseph was an upholsterer. By 1910 they had
moved west
to Portland, where Joseph ran his own upholstery shop. In
1920, at the
age of 65, he had returned to his old occupation of miller at a
Portland cereal mill. He died in 1927 at the age of 73.
Late the
following year, Minnie's name began to appear in newspaper ads for
Tanlac, a patent medicine. The ads ran through the end of
1929 in
numerous papers in Oregon and Montana. When she died in 1938
at the
age of 74, she was living at the same Portland address listed in the
newspaper ads and in her husband's obituary of 11 years earlier.
Both Joseph and Minnie are buried at Rose
City Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.
 We are left then, with a dilemma.
Either Minnie Huber of W.B. Boss was lying about the alleged
rape. Whom should we believe?
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