Notes for Roland and Maureen
by Kathryn Barger
October 1981

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I’ve heard the word “depression” used so often the last few years, but no one really knows the meaning of the word unless they lived through the Depression of the 30’s. These notes I’ve written tell of a few of the things that happened to one young couple – your Mom and Dad – who started their life together at that time.

We had to do lots of trading during the 30’s. Not too many families had money to buy with. I traded my wedding dress to Bettie Hulse for 6 laying hens. Jack, her husband, was a little put out about that. By the time she picked six laying hens out of her flock it didn’t leave too many layers, so they ran short of eggs.

We were trying to get a little start of cows built up, so Daddy traded our battery-powered radio-phonograph combination for a cow. This was in the fairly early days of radio and those batteries were huge and expensive. None of us could afford to replace them once they were dead. But the phonograph worked and it was a pretty piece of furniture. Then he traded his new saddle for a cow and an older saddle.

We turned the cows out on the open range and, at about the same time, Daddy got a job helping build a bridge in the Beaverhead country. When the job was finished and he got home, the cows were not to be found anyplace. We never did find them, but were pretty sure we knew what happened to them. A rancher rented or leased a place just south of us and moved a bunch of cows in. He went into partnership in a meat market in Mogollon. He furnished the meat and the other fellow ran the market. We knew but couldn’t prove he butchered our cows and hauled them to Mogollon. Not only us but other ranchers were missing cows in the same way. When he left the area he left with as many cows as he moved in with. In later years he was brought to trial for stealing cattle, but was never convicted. I could name both of these men but maybe I’d better not.

It seemed we were doomed to have bad luck with our cows. Earlier, before we had moved to the ranch and while we were both still working at Santa Rita, Grandma and Grandpa Barger gave us a young heifer from a very good milk cow they had. The little heifer was heavy with calf so we figured we had us a good milk cow for when we quit our jobs and moved to the ranch. Daddy hired a fellow to drive the heifer along with some other livestock from near Santa Rita to Beaverhead where another rancher would take her withs some of his on to Horse Springs. The fellow (I could tell you his name) that started from Santa Rita with the stock learned that there was to be a dance at Beaverhead, and to be sure he got there in time for the dance he drove the stock to fast for the little heifer and killed her.

Then in that first year at the ranch we had another cow die. She was poor and weak and with a new calf, and she couldn’t make it. We did save the calf. When it was a few months old, we traded it for a five-gallon can of hog lard. At that time we didn’t have a milk cow so we had no milk and butter. For a spread for our bread we mixed lard and sugar together. We had used about halfway down on this can of lard when we came to a big black “woolie-worm” that had fallen in the lard as it had been poured in the can. You didn’t throw anything away in those days, so we just scooped the worm out and used the rest of the lard. Today, over fifty years later, I still like the taste of sugar and lard and taste it every time I make a cake. Lard and sugar make good sugar toast.

Late in the fall of 1930, our first year on the ranch Frank Dumas, a neighboring homesteader, wanted Daddy to take him into Magdalena to a doctor. He had something wrong with a foot that home remedies wasn’t helping. At that time they had no car and we and a Model T Ford roadster. That was about three months before Roland was born, so instead of staying home alone while they were gone, I went up to Mary Dumas’ to stay with her and her little boy, Joris, who was three years old, while the men were away.

Sometime earlier, Frank had set out some traps trying to catch some coyotes and that morning, as the men were leaving, Frank told Mary to look about a trap in the draw below the house. He had heard some howling down that way.

After the men left Mary, Joris and I took a 22 rifle and went down there and, sure enough, there was a coyote in the trap caught by just one leg. Mary took careful aim to shoot it so as not to damage the hide more than necessary. After she shot it, it fell and we thought it was dead. We worked and worked trying to spring the trap to get the coyote but couldn’t do it. It was too strong for us, so we walked up the draw looking for a stick or limb or something to pry the trap open. We had to go quite a ways to find one and when we got back our “dead” coyote had come to and was really on the warpath. Mary’s shot had only creased him. If we had been able to spring that trap when we first tried we would have been carrying that coyote home when he came to.

We didn’t have a battery for the Model-T, so to start it Daddy would pull it from the saddle horn with our old horse we called “Snip.” I would be in the car and when Daddy got it to rolling pretty fast, I would turn the ignition on and it would start.

One time when we were trying to start the car, we had got it to roll real good when the cinch on his saddle broke. The next thing I saw was Daddy and his saddle laying in the middle of the road and him hollering “Don’t run over me. Don’t run over me.” Needless to say, I got stopped in time. This Snip horse would pull anything he could possibly move from the saddle horn, but if he was in a bad humor would balk at pulling a wagon up even a very small hill.

This wagon we had was a home-made affair. Daddy had built it using the running gears of an old car and building a bed on it of lumber. One time when Roland was about three months old we had going in this wagon to Jack Hulse, four or five miles from our place, where we got into their big spring wagon. We were al going to go to Green’s Gap to a home talent rodeo with dinner on the grounds. Before leaving Jack’s, Daddy put our horses in a little holding pasture near the house. When we got back late that evening we found Old Snip tangled up in the barbed wire fence. Years before he had been cut up pretty bad by barded wire, so instead of trying to get himself untangled, he just stood there, probably most of the day. He was so mad! On the way home we came to a small rise in the road and Snip decided he couldn’t pull that little hill. NO amount of coaxing helped and he eventually sat down on the wagon tongue and broke it.

There was nothing to do but for Daddy to unhitch the team and for us to start walking on home, me carrying Roland and Daddy driving the team. It was pretty scary as it was very dark and we were in rattlesnake country. We made it ok.

I was using this same Snip horse to pull a corn planter one spring. Daddy was going ahead of me with a team of horses and a middlebuster which left a furrow to plant the corn in. Snipe knew I didn’t know too much about what I was doing, so he started turning before we would come to the end of a row – turning a little sooner at the next row. Even skipped some rows. When Daddy would get a hold of him he would go on to the end with no argument. The corn in that field came up a little spotty.

During the Depression years, flour sacks were really indispensable. We made everything out of them. The flour we used was called “Pride of Denver” and the name was printed on the sacks with almost permanent dye. I made Daddy some flour sack underwear which ended up the “Pride of Denver” across the back of them. Another woman made her husband some floursack underwear – her flour was “Blue Bird” brand. His underwear had “Blue Bird” across his. It fit – he was a Blue Bird type. I’ve made shirts, dresses, aprons, blouses, curtains, sheets, pillowcases and many other things out of flour sacks. I even made a Santa Claus costume one year out of sacks and a package of red dye.

During those Depression days there were many things we had to do without. One particular fall we didn’t have a clock. We had a little field of beans that a light frost had hit before we got around to pulling them, and to pull them without the beans shattering we had to pull them early of a morning while a little frost or dew was on them. The morning we were to work that field we got up before daylight, guessing at what time it might be, so we could get breakfast over with and the in the field to have time to see to pull the beans before the sun dried them out. We got breakfast over (fried chicken and biscuits) and went to the field. It still wasn’t daylight. That time of year it was cold early in the morning, especially for Roland, who was about a year and a half old, so Daddy built us a fire to keep warm by. We stood around that fire at least two hours before it turned day! We had probably gotten up around three o’clock instead of five o’clock.

During this time of doing without a clock, we really got pretty good at judging what time it was by where the sun was in relation to the cracks in the board floor on our front porch. Helen and Jim were teenagers at that time and were out at the ranch for a few days. They kept me busy telling them what time it was so they could check me by their watches. I wouldn’t be far off.

The summer the government started the C.C.C. camps (1933) Daddy got a job driving a truck at the Tularose C.C.C. camp. It meant his being away from home and Roland and I would be home alone. Times were so hard we had no choice. At that time we had an old milk cow that would hide in the evenings at milking time. We had a bell on her but she knew how to keep it quiet. Her favorite place to lay down and hide was in a flat about a half or three quarters of a mile from the house that had grown up on yellow sunflower type of weeds. Also that same summer I didn’t have any shoes. That is no exaggeration – I had no shoes. I was wearing an old discarded pair of Daddy’s that was wide and loose at the tope. Roland and I started for the old cow one evening and, going through those sunflowers, I kept thinking my feel felt damp. Finally I discovered the sunflowers were loaded with newly hatched little worms that were falling in my shoes. If we hadn’t really needed that milk I might have been tempted to let that old cow stay there.

Daddy had other jobs that were very trying, but he had to take them. Bill Arnold owned the Little Horse Springs store and was good to give us a little credit at times, mostly because all we ever charged was salt, soda, baking power and such – just the barest of essentials. He would give Daddy a few days work once in a while. He wanted Daddy to plow a lake bed down on the Augustine Plains and plant it with oats and alfalfa. Daddy took his team, wagon, bedroll and a bach-ing outfit. He had to camp right out in open plains. In the spring the wind blows so much of the time down there and it was bad at that time. It would blow the horses’ hay away before they could eat it. Imagine four or five days out there – what it would be like with no way to get away from that wind. The oats were to act as a nurse crop to the alfalfa. Supposedly the oats would grow for only the first year, leaving a stand of alfalfa. It didn’t work that way – the rabbits ate the alfalfa! Two different years Bill had Daddy plant that lake bed. The Alamocita would run that far some years and irrigate the bed. One year Daddy was cutting the oats for bill and he cut several bales of native grass that had grown high along with the oats. Being fenced and protected and watered from the Alamocita, it had really grown.

Daddy worked on a road job one winter over in the Old Horse Springs area and was coming home only on weekends; so, once again, Roland and I were alone. It came such a deep snow, the men couldn’t work and Daddy was worried about us at home alone. He borrowed a saddle horse from Juan Carrejo to come to see about us. There was too much snow to make it in the Ford. The snow was belly deep to the horse and it took a full half-day to get to the ranch, a distance of about three miles or so. He found we were managing to cope with the storm, so after he and the horse ate and rested a little, went back to the job. On this job he didn’t have an apartment to bach in. During that storm I can remember wearing knee-high boots to do the corral work in and, each step I took, snow would fall in my boots.

During those early years on the ranch, Roland and I were alone so often. I never left him alone at the house when I’d have to go do the milking, feeding, etc. No matter how cold it was, I took him with me. He loved it. Daddy had built him a “cow box” – a box up high enough that he would be out from under feet of the stock and out of any danger with a belt to fasten him in. The cow corral was built of logs and adjoined the stock lot on one side so that side was built about eight or nine feet high. One time, when I was out there with Roland, I looked up to see a stray bull in the corral. I’ve always been deathly afraid of bulls. I grabbed Roland out of his box and some way I climbed over that high side of the corral into the stock lot with him under one arm. Under ordinary circumstances that could be done.

Bettie Hulse once said she was more afraid of a waspy cow than of a bull. Not me. Cows and I always got along pretty good, especially the ones I milked. We each had “our cows” that we milked and “my cows” didn’t want Daddy milking them. One morning, for some reason or other, he was milking all the cows. He came in from the corral with his pants ripped all down the front. One of “my cows” had tried to kick him when he started to milk her and had just caught his pants with her hoof. We were milking four and sometimes five cows then and shipping cream. We would take the cream to the Post Office, where the mailman packed it up and shipped in on to Denver or Albuquerque – I can’t remember which.

The mail truck came to Horse Springs three days a week: Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. We were two and a half or three miles from the post office, so we didn’t get down there every mail day, especially when Daddy had to go horseback.

The summer of ’33 was a very dry year out there. There were lots of black clouds, but all we had out of them was lightning – the worst we have ever seen. Daddy was driving a truck for the C.C.C. camp and one afternoon he was dropping off Luna Hill with a load of dynamite and caps with a terrible electric storm all around him, with lightning above him and below him. He could look down the canyon and see lightning all over. Actually it is against the law to have dynamite and caps in the same load, but that made no difference to the bosses. Daddy sure thought his time was about up that afternoon. He said that was the fastest he ever drove down that hill. It was the old Luna road, too. Narrow, crooked and steep, and with places where there was only room for one vehicle at a time.